


Eldritch Bingo

by Mehofkirkwall



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Elias Bouchard Being a Bastard, Saving my faves and working through some things, Self-Indulgent, Self-Insert, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Working Out My Feelings Through Fic, emma harvey is not valid, eventually, just a whole fear soup really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 92,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24279496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mehofkirkwall/pseuds/Mehofkirkwall
Summary: Au where an extremely cursed American wraps various archival assistants and characters in a blanket, and refuses to let them die. Because i care about doomed characters and because i can have a self indulgent au, as a treat.--"Instinct is, after all, a funny thing. Very informative, but not really descriptive when you need it to be. It tends to tell you just enough for you to know something is wrong, and then it cuts out to force you into a decision."
Comments: 124
Kudos: 97





	1. B10: Darkness as a Metaphor for Not Knowing Everything

**Author's Note:**

> I am here to have FUN and keep characters alive. Maybe write good fic too, we'll see.

The main problem with experiencing the supernatural, especially in America, is that nine times out of ten people think you’re crazy. The one time out of ten is then divided into half thinking you’re talking about aliens, and the other half being entirely too willing to admit that they, too, have had similar weird shit happen to them. A further subdivision is “people who told others” and “people who kept that shit quiet”. All this to say, you have remarkably few options if you run into something weird and want to find out what it was without being treated like the town weirdo for the rest of your life.

In theory, the Usher Foundation in Washington, D.C was a respectable institution where people could go and share the weird things that happened to them. Get it on paper and get the situation looked at with no judgment, so on. In practice, if you couldn’t physically go there to give a statement, the intake people tended to treat you as if you were playing a prank. Or referred you to a psychiatrist and asked you to come back when you were sure you weren’t just seeing things. It certainly didn’t help that the foundation seemed to be situated quite in the middle of how most academic institutions treated the population: the higher the class, the more credible. Joe Public out in the middle of nowhere, seeing eyes in the corn field the same night his neighbor goes missing, is—for some reason—less credible than Phillip Moneybags saying he felt a presence in his mansion in upstate New York. Obviously, not _all_ of the people there felt that way, but its never really a question of all. It’s a question of enough. Enough gets disbelieved, enough gets a pass, enough goes not investigated because it would be inconvenient.

Enough that, when someone is desperate _enough_ for answers, they will quickly move past the foundation and onto someplace else. Mostly this meant going to conventions and trying to explain the experience to other believers, and receiving a polite nod before they also labeled you as wildly out of touch with reality. From there, it was shady forums you heard about third, or fourth hand. Then, it was usually another desperate attempt to get the Usher foundation to listen to you before they gave you an even more far fetched option: The Magnus Institute. Some series of academics in England with doctorates and no particular interest in anything that happened across the pond. This was the more desperate option, if the forums were to be believed, and not for anyone who has any hope of quietly tucking away their experience as a bad situation that they could live with in secret.

This is perhaps how one April May found themselves up in the middle of the night, squinting out the window, with a scrap of paper in one hand and their landline in the other. The line was crackly as they pushed the proper buttons to make their rural line attempt an international call. They imagined it was only partially to do with the wind outside doing its level best to topple the telephone pole, the late hour, and the terrible wires. That, and what was sitting on top of the pole, but they were going to try ignoring _that_ until they finished their call. And perhaps until the dull ache in their skull had calmed down a little bit.

After the fifth ring, they started to feel a little nervous about the whole thing and briefly considered hanging up. Part of it was, they supposed, nerves. The other part was that they weren’t entirely sure their math had been correct.  
A glance to the clock told them it was one in the morning, and some very tired math told them it should be at least nine in the morning in London. At least. Give or take a possible misunderstanding of the way humankind had decided to mark time across the planet, anyway. They dropped the paper to their kitchen counter and tapped their nails over it as another few rings passed by. April was reasonably sure that, with a name like ‘ _The Magnus Institute_ ’, these people should have been able to answer their phones at nine in the morning. Or, they considered briefly as the line crackled again, it was actually around five in the evening and they’d miscalculated. It was known to happen. Just as likely was that the thing on the telephone pole was making the call not go through properly and was just letting them ramp up their phone bill. That _would_ be their luck, really. The sound of the other end picking up startled them out of their pondering.

“You have reached the Magnus Institute, London. This is Rosie at the front desk, how may I direct your call?” The receptionists voice was clipped, but professional. The sounds of people in the background came across as an odd static that they weren’t entirely sure was only on the phone.

“Uh, yeah. I heard you guys take statements about, uh. Weird things?” The only reason they didn’t kick themselves was because they were reasonably sure she’d have heard it. They’d never been great at making phone calls without a reason that usually came down to ‘someone is making money’, and this was the definition of a call for personal reasons. Being so tired didn’t help either. They tried to level their voice before continuing again. “I mean, you people research about paranormal things, right? Unexplained stuff that happens to people?”

A pause that felt an awful lot like someone dialing back how much the look on their face was going to come across vocally.

“That is part of what we do here, yes. Would you like to come in to make a statement?” It felt less like a realistic suggestion, and more like a script this woman had to follow. April reminded themselves that this was the point of having someone directing calls, and that scripts are useful for everyone. The voice on the other end didn’t seem to sense the nerves. “The archival department handles those.”

“Right. I mean, no, I can’t come in because I’m… I’m in America? I tried your number because the Usher folks wouldn’t take my story? So, I called over to you guys, and I was sort of… Hoping for an option two?” Wonderful start and continuation, they thought. Their nails scratched idly at their palm to focus on not rambling on forever. Thankfully, the other end didn’t comment and let them keep going with the thought. “What I mean is, is there someone I could give my statement to over the phone? I’m sorry, if that's too much to ask. I know its early and you probably have a lot of people calling in.”

There was a bit of shuffling on the other end, and the distinctive sound of a pen being clicked.

“I can transfer you, no worries! If the archives don’t pick up, I’ll be sure to pass your number on to the archivist and she’ll see about getting back to you. Don’t worry about a thing, she’s a lovely person.”

They tried very hard not to imagine the bill for a return call and crossed their fingers that the spike of panic wouldn’t come through their voice. Some small logical part of their brain reminded them that it would have been on the Institute to pay for, but it was far quieter than everything else.

“Thank you.”

The thing on the telephone pole had gotten just a touch shorter in the time it took for the phone to finish ringing again. A bit fatter, too, though they didn’t know if it was simply getting down or changing to mess with them. Or their glasses prescription was out of date again. Not the time for theories, they supposed.

“Magnus Archives.” The voice that said it was uncomfortably firm. Not that they had supposed someone working in an archive of spooky shit would have sounded any particular sort of way, but it was still a little jarring after the calm tone of the receptionist. The squeak they’d managed in response seemed to surprise the other end, if only because their tone was markedly kinder when they continued. Also felt a heap more insincere, but April wasn’t going to judge while trying not to scratch a hole in their palm. “Gertrude Robinson, head archivist speaking. How may I help you?”

“Right. Yes. My name is April, and I’d like to give a statement? I’m sorry I can’t come in person, but well, America.” Their resulting grimace took their eyes from the window just long enough to make them uncomfortable. Thankfully, when their eyes moved back, it had only moved a little bit further down. “Sorry.”

A pause and the sound of shuffling papers.

“It’s quite alright, dear. I assume you were referred by the Usher foundation?”

“Er, in a manner of speaking. They… they didn’t believe me, I don’t think. But I did—I did see what I saw! And felt. And, and keep seeing and--” They gave a shuddering, slightly hysterical chuckle, and heard her sigh through her nose. They focused down on the floor in front of them, not wanting the nerves to tense out the muscles in their neck. Their nails dug into their knees a bit while they tried to be coherent; thankfully their jeans were in the way. “They wouldn’t even let me send in a letter with my statement, and said I was just crazy or, or, playing a prank or--”

“Its alright, dear, take a moment if you need it.” Another pause. “I promise that there will be no judgment. The only judgment there might be, is whether or not we’ll need to make follow up calls later.”

“Thank you.” A deep breath later, and their eyes wandered back to the telephone pole. It now appeared to have a particularly large and angular trash bag leaned up against it. They knew it was not. “I, um. I actually don’t know which thing to start with. There’s been a few.”

“Why don’t we start with your name, for the record, and we can start with which one had the largest impact. Or even the most recent, if you’d prefer.” More sounds of shifting and the clicking of a pen. The line sounded much clearer now that the thing on the pole was not, in fact, on the pole.

“Right. April, April May.”

“…Very well. Statement of April May, then. Now, whenever you’re ready, dear.”

The strangest feeling came over them, partway through that sentence. Like static worked its way from the phone and down their spine, settling in and making them sit upright. If it wasn’t such a novel sensation, April might have thought it was a chill from being up so late. That said, it wasn’t like they could focus on that feeling if they’d have wanted to. The line buzzed, and their tongue tingled as they started to speak.

“Sometimes the darkness watches me.” Another breath, this time deeper and more even, as they watched the thing that was no longer on the pole. It had shifted over a bit. “Ever since I was a kid, I've had a… I wouldn’t call it a fear of the dark. The dark was never what scared me, not really. It was always what might have been _in_ the dark, just outside of where I could see. Everyone and their dog’s afraid of the dark, at some point, though right? Everyone. That’s why people make so much money on nightlights. I never had a nightlight, we couldn’t afford one, and besides—I didn't really need one. In the trailer park I live in, there's street lights about every fifty feet. I… don’t know what that is in metric, sorry. But the lights, they always lit up my room no matter what. Not in a big way, but enough that the shadows always seemed smaller. Darker, sure, but smaller. Easier to ignore. It was almost always comforting, you know, knowing that no matter what I heard, or felt, I just needed to open my eyes and I’d see exactly what it was. I _liked_ that about it. The only thing I ever needed to do, when I was scared, was to see.  
  
The first time I saw it, I was six years old. My family had just brought home my new baby brother, and I was so excited that I couldn't sleep. I was so, so convinced that he’d cry and I’d be ready to be the best big sis ever and… and I don’t think I knew what I would do, I was six and hardly able to do much, but I was just so excited. So I laid there, straining my ears and tried to ignore the sounds my pets were making outside. That’s when I heard it. An irregular scratching, like something trying to get purchase and failing after just a moment of success. It was like hearing a cat try to stop from a dead run on a freshly cleaned tile floor, but in reverse, somehow. The pitch didn’t feel like it went the right way. I sat for the longest time, eyes closed, trying to understand what it was. At first, I thought it was just wind moving the tree outside against the house. Again, it was a trailer—its not like they’re entirely soundproof, and it was mid-spring. Windstorms were more common than clear skies, so it wouldn’t have been a shock. I was almost content with that answer. But then, then it started getting louder. I thought, then, that maybe we had mice again and they were in my wall. Also not an uncommon occurrence: the park was surrounded by wheat fields on two sides, a farm on the other, and the lumber mill on the last. Our first cat had been adopted specifically because of the mice. I was also almost content with that answer too, because my bed was right against a wall and it sounded very, very close. But, and I think I knew before I opened my eyes, that it wasn’t coming from the wall.  
  
I remember that I opened my eyes and looked around, as if that would help me hear any better. I also remember looking down, and thinking it was terribly cliché that it was coming from under my bed. Now, my bed was opposite the window, and at the time I had decided that nothing could have been down there, because the street light was shining through. That nothing could possibly have been down there, because it was supposed to be lit up. I was… so convinced. Seems silly now. But I think I also knew I was wrong. I think I just wanted to be wrong about being wrong, so badly, that I had half convinced myself by the time I shifted to look over the side of the mattress. It was getting, so, so terribly loud by then. I half expected my parents to come tell me to cut it out and go back to sleep. It felt almost like the sound was jabbing into my ears with each off kilter scratch, each scrape making it worse. I had to know what was down there, but at the same time I was so, so scared. Looking back, I don’t think I was afraid of what was making the noise. I was afraid I wouldn’t have been able to figure it out after I’d looked. Isn’t that strange?”

They interrupted themselves with a short, almost bitter laugh, before continuing with a sigh.

“But when I finally moved over, finally looked down, it… it was just shadow. A strange one, one that shouldn’t have been in there as the light shined in, but a shadow. The whole under the bed was solid black. When I looked, the scratching stopped; not like it had slid to a stop or anything like that. It was like someone had hit pause. In that moment, I was overwhelmed with the feeling like something was in there, waiting. Like it was watching me just as much, but it didn’t feel like it was out of curiosity. I felt like I was being sized up by something hungry, that it was waiting for me to react to this fact. I thought it was wrong and unnatural, but at the time—because I was a child—I just thought it was a…” They laughed at themselves a moment, rubbing their face before looking back out the window. Their eyes were unfocused, looking more in that direction than at anything. “I just thought it was a really stupid monster, if it was one. I mean, all the places to be, and it’s under my bed? The closet was right there! That spot didn’t even face the window, and had much more room. The hallway didn’t even HAVE a window. A million places in the world it could have been lurking, but no. It was under _my_ bed, in my room, and in my house. Waiting for my reaction. Waiting for me to, I don’t know, be afraid of it. Like my initial gut reaction hadn’t been that it was wasting my time.”

Gertrude made an appropriate humming noise to urge them on. The thing not on the pole was now a hard to describe mass by the road. It reminded them of when people tried to fit trash bags around old toys, odd angles and twitching in the wind far more than its size should allow. They gave it a tight smile through the window.

“Right, so. I… I watched it. I rolled fully onto my belly and stared at the shadow under my bed until the sun came up. I, I don’t remember what happened between when the lamps went out and when the sun came up. My window faced north-ish, so it wasn’t getting direct dawns light, but it was there. Ambient. Enough that it should have made a dent in the thing under my bed. I remember feeling light headed after a while, because I was just hanging off the side of my bed and waiting for it to make sense. It didn’t, and honestly if that had been the last I saw of it, I think I would have spent the rest of my life blaming it on dark matter or, or some physics thing I managed to learn about at three am. It gets fuzzy between when the streetlights went off at six, and when I woke up several hours later. I remember feeling upset, because I had let it get away and not seen it leave. The only evidence I had that I hadn’t dreamed it, was that I woke up feeling like I’d slept outside. Which, given it was February, some chill would make sense. But we had the heat on, so my baby brother wouldn’t get cold. I realized a bit later, that the heating vent for my room was under my bed. I tried to tell my parents, of course, but they told me not to lie to them. I assume they thought I was jealous and wanted more attention. Honestly, after being told to drop it enough, I’d put it down to just… not sleeping. I’d learned that week that people see things when they’re tired, so I assumed I was just… dreaming with my eyes open.”

A shift in position to help keep an eye on the street and not have their legs fall asleep. They hadn’t planned on balancing on a kitchen stool for this long, honestly.

“It showed up again, when I was ten. It was the start of summer and I was racing bikes around the park with the other kids. The older kids were calling it a proper race, but I didn’t care. I was just happy to speed around when nothing was… going wrong. I remember that day, mostly, because I’d managed to lap one of the kids with a mountain bike, so I had stayed out later to take a few more laps. Felt better to speed around, gloating, than going home to do chores. I had just finished a jump off one of the speed bumps, when I felt it. The shadow was there again, watching. Well, ‘there’ is not strictly correct. It was following me around the park: from under porches, to the mailboxes, to the shadows under the trees seeming a bit too solid for the breeze, or the afternoon sunlight. I shouldn’t have been able to tell it was there at all, really, except that I could. I could tell when it changed perspectives, I guess. When it went from behind me to in front, when it waited just a half second longer than the last lap because I’d started slowing down. I didn’t watch for it, specifically, but I could see it. Like it could see me, watching and seeing what I did. Always in the dark patches at the corner of my eye, that sort of thing. It didn’t end up under my bed, that time, but I had to talk myself out of checking just the same.  
  
Next time I saw it was later that year, on the fourth of July. Dad was out working when it was getting dark, so mom did the fireworks herself. I remember because the rockets tipped over at us, and I had picked up my little brother and ran. One shell hit right where he’d have been sitting. I spent a good ten minutes crying and making sure he was alright. Mom didn’t understand why I wasn’t keen on lighting off more fireworks, for some reason, and we’d argued about it. I think that’s why I wasn’t paying attention, later, when it did get dark. Was still too worked up about making sure my brother was alright, that I didn’t say anything when mom said I should walk some leftovers over to my grandma. She lived a few houses down, and the streetlights were on, so mom didn’t think it would be a problem even with my ‘thing’ about the dark. I mean, one quick trip when the sky is full of fire and the lamps are all on—shadows shouldn’t be a problem. All over, because light moves, but not a _problem_. Besides, I was ten. What kid’s still afraid of the dark at ten? Well, that was the logic anyway. So, out I went, Tupperware in hand. I don’t even remember what I was taking over, if I was worried about it getting too cold or too hot. I just remember that part way down the driveway I realized there weren’t any fireworks. I could hear them, but I couldn’t see them. I should really have just gone back at that point, told mom I was too much of a coward and put the whole thing off until the morning. Instead, I kept walking. I remember thinking that if I could save my little brother from death by firework, I could walk a few houses down a lit road and be fine. I’m not sure where that bravery came from, but I like to think it wasn’t just adrenaline talking.  
  
Have you ever been out, late at night, and things stop feeling real? I don’t know if you have the same kind of lights over there, but here they get bluer over time, or at least the ones in the park do. They make everything seem kind of surreal, like some kind of movie, even on nights I couldn’t feel something watching. I always thought, that if I moved fast enough, I could look back and see the me that hadn’t quite caught up with time. It felt like I wasn’t seeing the real thing, not really. Real didn’t exist until you were inside a house, because the streetlights were just points of reality that you marked like signposts. At the time, adding in the fact the sky was dark on the fourth of July, and that I was alone, I was convinced I was going to die. Or that, perhaps, I had and hadn’t noticed.  
  
I had just passed the first streetlight when I felt it. What was odd, aside of the darkness, is that I could feel it—not under a tree or a parked car, or even the deep dark under porches I passed—but in the corner of my eye. Like it was just behind me, always just out of view, except when it let me see just a bit of it. It was the deepest dark I’d ever imagined at the corner of my eye, even when I’d just passed a street light that’s got the whole area lit up. Now, I wasn’t stupid. I knew if you looked at a lamp in a dark place, the whole rest of it seems darker in comparison. I knew that, because I’d learned that and I trusted what I knew. I also knew that seeing the bright circle of the next lamp shouldn’t have filled me with dread. Light, generally, meant safety. It would mean being able to see what was around me, to identify what was there if there was anything, and to assure me if there was nothing. Light, generally, meant knowing. Light had never once felt like… I don’t know how to explain it, but in that moment? The light felt like a trap. It was preposterous—you can’t hide something in light, that’s not how it _worked_. I knew that and I was still convinced that if I went for the light, something would happen. I think the shadow knew that. Maybe it had learned from staring at me from the dark, just as I had learned it had existed by watching from the light. Learned what I considered safe, and what I would tell myself to make it not seem frightening, so it could use that against me. Maybe I was just paranoid. Maybe, over the years, I’ve made up rationalizations to make it feel safer when the lights go out.  
  
That was the first time I felt like it was going to do something, I think. Actually act, and that it was capable of action. I didn’t know if it was going to be to me, or people around me. I didn’t know why, and that bothered me almost as much as my implied sanctuary being used against me. I became faintly aware, at that point, that I felt deathly cold. I tried desperately not to shake as I tried to figure out what to do. Instinctively, I think I knew that if I went for the light, things would go badly. Instinct is, after all, a funny thing. Very informative, but not really descriptive when you need it to be. It tends to tell you just enough for you to know something is wrong, and then it cuts out to force you into a decision. At that point, I wasn’t really making decisions. I was a small child, armed with a Tupperware, and I was looking at a choice between being hunted and being snared in a trap. Looking back, I… I suppose I made a choice, though I’m not entirely sure it wasn’t what it wanted, in the end.  
  
I had been walking all this time, and the only variable was if I was going to fall for what it seemed to have planned. I just kept walking, looking ahead toward where I knew my grandmas’ house was going to be. I’m not saying that I was being brave, there. Honestly, I was getting more and more afraid with every step, but for a different reason than having something hunting me. It was that I _was_ afraid. It was that I didn’t know, for certain, that this thing was something I could understand enough to survive if I stopped. I didn’t know if I could run fast enough to get safe before it got to me. I didn’t _know_ and that made me much more afraid than anything I could imagine lurking at the edges of my vision. Thinking back, I think I was taking the back away slowly approach to it. Living where I do, you get taught pretty young how to not get eaten by bears or mountain lions. You act bigger, more confident than you are, and you either scare the thing away, or back away slowly. The option of playing dead exists, but I certainly didn’t consider that a good idea at the time. I obviously didn’t have the option of being larger than something I didn’t know the dimensions of, and actually backing away seemed like a surefire way to run into it. What I did have the option of, however, was to keep walking at the same pace I had been the entire time. Another thing about instincts, and not being eaten, is that you do not run from a predator unless you have no other option. Everything has an instinct, and most creatures that hunt for their meals will see something running and decide it’s prey. At the time, I don’t think that was a conscious thought, not really. All I knew was that I felt this… shadow getting closer when I took a step too quickly, and stayed on pace when I spaced the steps out. I had the strangest feeling that, had I had the will to stop walking, it would have paused and waited for me to continue. I had no way of knowing, but just like I knew not to trust the light on gut feeling alone, I knew it didn’t want me caught right then. That wasn’t the game.  
  
I had kept my eyes on my grandmas house, as much as I could while involuntarily glancing left and right. It seemed so far away, but sure enough it was getting closer as I moved toward it. I don’t know why I thought it wouldn’t, but it wasn’t a night for providing me with many answers. The feeling got closer, too. It was hard to not hyperventilate, the air was cold and clear. In retrospect that was strange, not just because of the weather and the smoke that should have been there, but because I don’t… I didn’t used to breathe faster when I was scared. Tensed to hell and back, screamed, hit things, sure. But this was new at the time. That's about when I realized I wasn’t so much breathing fast on my own, as matching something. It wasn’t breathing, exactly, like how pushing air in and out of a pump isn’t actually breathing. Now, logically, shadows do not breathe. They both have no need to, and I assume, no organs to do so with. That did not stop the icy pressure from fluttering across the nape of my neck. It didn’t stop the faint sounds like raspy breathing, just loud enough to be heard around the fireworks, from being there. I don’t think I’ve ever worked out why it did that, all the way past my grandmothers front gate. By that point it was in the corner of my eye in much the same way the sky almost always is. A given that you don’t quite know how to feel about, because there’s always something else going on. In the ten or so feet between the gate and the bottom step, the noises—fireworks, the weird not breathing, my own breathing—it all sounded so much louder. Like it was all getting pressed in and reverberating around the dark with me. Like it was scratching its way into my ear again, and not working with the whole outdoors.  
  
It wasn’t until my foot hit the second step that I wanted to bolt up the final three steps, and into the warm glow of the porch light. Not because of the sounds, no those had actually started to fade back a bit. No, it was because I made it to the logical conclusion that there was something behind me and my elderly grandmother was separated from it by a flimsy trailer door. If the light was a trap, I was walking right into it and leading this thing to her. I climbed the next step and the sounds were almost completely replaced by my own pulse. I was sure it was going to let me get just close enough to have hope of rescue, and kill me before I knew what was happening. I stood on the next step, and stared intently down at the ring of light ahead of me. There were no hands that suddenly grabbed me when I stopped moving, no blow to my head, or some inky tendril dragging me off to parts unknown. I tried to think, and I couldn’t. My heart was too loud and the light was so bright. The only thing that would go through my head was that I hoped, if I were to die, that my grandma would be safe. Funny, how I was basically in a horror movie and I was worried about my grandmother. I didn’t even consider that this thing could have gotten us both if it wanted to. Used my death cry to bait her outside and hunted her in that blue shifted nightmare. I suppose there are some things… some things even I didn’t want to consider.  
  
The shadow let me reach the light, as you can imagine. I looked everywhere before knocking on the door, but it was nowhere to be seen. The fireworks came back, too, and I’m not ashamed to admit they spooked me almost as much as the coughing fit when I realized the smoke was back, too. Grandma thought I’d just been afraid of walking in the dark, of course. She said she was proud of me, and that she’d let me stay the night. I didn’t manage to sleep that night, partially because I was sure it would be back for me, and partially because I knew… I would have run the second I left that porch, had I left, and I would have died before I left the yard.”

The noise April made to accompany the shudder that ran through them was not their proudest moment, but they were also acutely aware that they had more to say. They weren’t entirely sure why, they could honestly have left it at ‘creepy shadow thing’, but they also could not. It didn’t matter, though, they had more and they were going to give more. They were also deeply aware of how silent the other end of the line had gotten, but something told them that the line wasn’t actually dead.

“Next was the year after that, when we moved houses. It was winter, and mom was busy taking my little brother to appointments, so it was just me and my dad for the day. We had gone to take a look at the finished house before we started moving things over, make sure the builders didn’t forget the roof. That sort of thing. It was broad daylight, the electricity was on, and all the walls were bright white, waiting to be painted and lived in. It was like everywhere you looked, there wasn’t a place where shadows could hide. I was so happy that, for a moment, I tried to ignore the feeling of recognition I got as we moved through the dining room and into the kitchen. The feeling like we weren’t the only ones looking around. I tried to focus on other, less stressful, things. My brother and I got our own rooms, finally, and a bathroom all to ourselves. We two still had to share, but it was a level of privacy you didn’t get with four people sharing one. We’d also bought one of those fancy fridges that made ice, like we were suddenly from the right side of the tracks. And there was a whole separate room for TV, instead of the living room, kitchen, and entryway all being one cramped space. The carpet was a lovely blue, that hadn’t been stained with twenty years of smoking and foot traffic. There were no water stains on the ceiling, and the floor didn’t creak when you walked over it.  
  
Distraction worked, for quite a bit longer than I had expected it to, in terms of not sending me screaming from my own home. I was aware of the shadow, just like I always was, and I knew it was watching us. My father, paranoid as _he_ always was, somehow didn’t feel it as he traipsed around kicking at the carpet and talking about padding. I remember thinking it was odd, because he seemed to be talking louder than normal, which he usually did to either make a point or scare someone off. It was really the only sort of volume control he had. Part of me wondered if he’d actually noticed, and didn’t want to worry me. Was he protecting me while coming up with some dramatic plan to keep us safe from the thing moving under the carpet? No, I don’t think he was. Retrospection makes it a lot harder to accept just how willing I was to think there was something that could have protected me, there. The first clue I had about it making itself known, was when my father started getting quiet. This house, it echoes. Its not large by any means, but the angles mean you can hear almost anything that happens inside, if you’re also inside. He’d walked into the bathroom to check the water pressure while I was looking at my new bedroom, telling me about how I was lucky because the water heater was closer to our bathroom. I remember standing in the middle of my room, and thinking how bright it all was in there. That, between the lights and the white paint, there was nothing else it could be, but bright and comforting. I really should have remembered that light didn’t always mean comfort, or safety. My father’s voice had gone strangely quiet, as had the sounds of running water from a room over. Now, I don’t mean he had started muttering, or sounded far away. It was like something had turned the volume down until I could barely hear it, with no effect on the clarity. The memory of the fireworks came back, just about the time I realized where the shadow had gone.”

Another bitter laugh, this time rounded out by a contemplative hum.

“It had taken my advice, I suppose, because directly behind where I was standing was my new closet. Like my old one, it had a sliding door that didn’t sit quite right, and was painted to match the walls. And like it had before, it… filled the space, an inky black block where it shouldn’t have been. Precisely from the small indent in the carpet where the door should slide closed, up to the ceiling, it was full of a solid black mass. I say it was black, because it’s the best word I have for it without waxing too poetic. If you look at an object that’s supposed to be black, there's still a sheen on it, because while it absorbs light, things on it do not. Shadows are black because light isn’t there to be reflected, or is so weak that it doesn’t do much other than tint things. This, though, this… As I stood there, I was reminded of a program I’d watched on black holes. How light didn’t so much as keep moving while missing a spot, as was warped around and possibly into the body of it. I remember becoming afraid, again. Partially from the fact that it was there again, and partially because I didn’t really have an excuse that time. Not really. The closet faced the window, and the sun was coming in directly. I had no excuses to make about not knowing what it was, or why it was there. I didn’t have any comforting explanation to shoo away the feeling as it watched me without eyes. As it waited. It didn’t _do_ anything, as far as I could tell, not besides waiting and watching. Looking back, I suppose it probably wanted me to do something about it. To see the light change with the clouds shifting outside, or hear the quiet sounds of my father in the other room shift and be so frightened… It wanted me to bolt. Looking back, I’m still not sure why I didn’t. I wanted to, I think, but it was like my legs were bolted in place as some part of me tried valiantly to work reason and logic into what I was looking at. I know, of course, if I’d ran it would have given chase and not stopped. Some part of me imagines what it would have been like to run, screaming, right then and there. If my father would have heard and, I don’t know, come to fight off the big scary monster. It’s silly, always has been, I suppose. I could never imagine my father losing in a fight, no matter what terrible thing was going to be up against him, but I very much could imagine this thing killing him. It’s terrible, but all I can imagine is that if he’d wanted to, he could have saved me from this thing because I thought he was so much scarier than anything else in the goddamn world. Like, darkness incarnate gave a single flying fuck about how I saw my dad. Shit, f—sorry! Sorry, for swearing.”

“It’s quite alright, dear. This all sounds very stressful, and I think you’ve earned a little swearing.” Gertrude sounded infinitely more sincere, now. Not kind, no that was a different tone. This was how someone sounded when they’d been through something similar, and April suddenly felt very sorry for the woman on the other end of the line. “Now, what happened after that?”

As nice as it felt to be being listened to, and as fuzzy as that made them feel, they weren’t quite _comforted_. The static was also still on their spine, and on their tongue, making it very difficult to sit with their thoughts at the moment. They had more to say.

“Thank you. It let me leave, but only after it closed the closet door. I feel like that was more to show it could, in fact, touch things. The implication, I assume, being that even if I locked it out of someplace, I really hadn’t. Not that it needed to convince me, but at that point I would be coming back anyway, wouldn’t I? After we’d started moving things into the house and settling in, I was so relieved it wasn’t in the closet anymore that I almost cried. Initially, I’d thought it had moved to the crawlspace under the house, when I could feel it under me, but couldn’t see it.” They picked idly at the edge of the kitchen counter for a moment before continuing. “I had sort of assumed that the crawlspace was going to be the death of me, more than once. Because the house was new, all the ducts and vents were laid out different down there, and an issue usually meant someone had to go down and fix it. Someone smaller than my six foot dad and with a slightly better back than my mom. June, my brother, wasn’t that good at navigating and I was. So, I usually go down there with a toolbox, a flashlight, and a deep feeling of unease. Initially, I’d thought I’d been safe on my rounds down there because I went down during the day. I’m not sure when I stopped thinking sunlight did anything to help me, but I am sure about the time I realized why I was safe down there. Well, why it didn’t seem to bother being there when I was, anyway. I was about sixteen when I realized that it wasn’t from a lack of opportunity, but from a complete and total lack of challenge. It couldn’t get what it _needed_ from me, down there. Sure, it could have killed me with no real interference down there all alone. It could also have done so when I hung upside down staring at it that first time, or when I was alone on the street, or when I was alone in my room all the times it decided to pay me a visit and be ominous. I know how it sounds, I do, but it made a certain amount of sense. I hadn’t been truly scared of it when I found it under my bed, not the way you are when you’re afraid of what you’re looking at. I was _confused_ and I was curious, afraid I wouldn’t ever figure out what it was, but I wasn’t afraid of it. When I found it in my closet, I was surprised it was in the daylight, and that it was being so overt in taunting me without going through with any implied harm it could do. I was afraid that, if I ran, it would chase and kill me, but I was not afraid of it in the closet. I was afraid that it took what I’d thought and used it, but I’ve never been sure if it wasn’t just moving around because there was no bed to be under. On the fourth, it certainly scared me. It had me right where it wanted me, and all it had to do was wait for the chase to begin, but I didn’t run. But I was _afraid of it_ and all the things it could do to me and mine. Down there, in the dirt, the cobwebs, the… Everything is too close down there. There’s no _room_ to be afraid of anything, but the house falling on you, the bugs down there biting you, or hurting yourself and getting terribly sick. I was totally aware how many tons my house weighed, held above me with cinder blocks and foundation. How long it would have taken someone to get out there to even start looking for my body, because if something went wrong it would be a body. But down there, in the dark, cloying dust? If it had come for me, that dark menace with no face, I would have no chance to be afraid. It would just swallow me up and move on. There was no room for anything but acceptance of that. Just like you can’t hunt someone for sport if they’re already tied to a chair, you can’t frighten someone who knows damn well that they’re playing rock paper scissors with death—even if it is to do something stupid, like fix an air vent.  
  
It was, ha, frighteningly easy to come to terms with the fact that it was playing with its food. That I was much more useful, or interesting, alive than I was dead. I suppose I didn’t have much other conclusion to reach, really. As I got older, it would appear more frequently. Every spike of anxiety, every panic attack where I sat in the dark to make everything be _quiet_ , it was there waiting. It would make sounds just too real to have been in my head, breathe on the back of my neck when I braved the night for some water. It was always there, always waiting for me to slip up and run like the frightened prey animal it wants me to be. Always one step behind, not because I’m outrunning it, but because it wants me to know I cannot. That I am never far enough away to be _safe_ , but it likes to leave the option open, as bait. Or maybe I’m waxing poetic. I don’t think it wants me dead, I know what if feels like to be in the room with someone that wants you dead and it’s a different feeling. This thing wants me to suffer. Lately, though, I think it wants to make me _confused_.”

The thing by the side of the road had moved to sit against their mailbox. They squinted harder, like that would reset it’s progress. April’s head ached just a little more, from the base of their skull around their ear.

“I caught it the other day, and I don’t think I was supposed to. I was coming home from a dance my college friend had taken me to, to get me out of the house when I wasn’t in class. We’d gotten back around midnight, and the only thing fighting off the darkness in the car had been the full moon. I could feel it far behind me when I got out of the car, like I’d just happened to notice it without thinking. Or, maybe, it hadn’t been planning on harassing me that night, and still had to move around like anything else on this planet. I remember waving my friend off, and starting up the front steps, with the usual feeling of it getting closer as I did so. Normally, I would have spent a lot of willpower to just reaching the door and getting inside, where I could at least tell myself there were other people. Normally, I think, it would also have moved faster, but as it was it felt like the shadow was taking its time. I think that’s why I stopped climbing on the second to last step, like my body had elected to test my theory without my brain’s input. Sure enough, I felt the shadow stop too. Then, I did something I still can’t reason out. I turned around and looked for it. I need to emphasize, a lot, that I did not make the conscious decision to turn around and face what _normally_ wouldn’t have allowed me to even try. I did not make the conscious decision to look directly at it and try, desperately, to reconcile what I saw with what I know to be right and true with the universe. I did not ask for the weeks of trying to figure out how to describe how little sense it made, or the looks on peoples faces when I try to put words to it. It had been at the end of my driveway, when my eyes hit on where I assume it was. It was like, and I have to use similes, because I’m not entirely sure it _was_ or _is_ anything at all. The shape of it was like if you took a man and pinched each angle of his body into dramatic points, and then stretched all of his proportions. Then, you broke those stretched spots at odd intervals and jointed them, so it still stood but only because it has stopped caring about gravity. It seemed almost to pulse inside of itself, and I realized why shortly after I also realized it was frozen in place. I mentioned black holes, before, but I saw then that it was entirely too accurate. It appeared to pulse, not I assume because it was, but because there was a steady stream of light disappearing into its outline. Like a small event horizon, warping moonlight and perception around itself. Again, it was watching for me to respond, and it was waiting for me to run. I assume it was the same level of involuntary action that kept me from doing so, as I turned and entered the house. It did not move when I did so. I think it learned from that night, too, because it doesn’t bother hiding very well anymore. No streetlights reach my room anymore, and I still have to attend classes that let out after dark. It sits, and it moves when I’m not watching it. I still don’t think it wants me dead, but that’s very little comfort. Death, and something wanting to kill me, is a line of logic I can follow with little trouble. This, though, this cat and mouse game is… a lot harder to understand. The only thing I think I can say with total confidence, is that I’m not sure which is worse: To live knowing you will be killed, or to live knowing you are a toy.”

Gertrude took a steadying breath as they watched the shadow sit in the middle of the driveway, still only paying lip service to the idea of a garbage bag. They hadn’t realized they were making a low, unsettled noise until she’d responded.

“Right. This… shadow creature. When was the last time you saw it?”

There was no static, now, just a bone deep exhaustion. April let out a heavy sigh and rubbed at their face again.

“Would you believe me if I told you I was looking at it right now?”

“Now?” She seemed concerned there, but it didn’t really strike true. They watched the moonlight warp around the faux garbage bag, their nails idly scratching along one another to stay awake. Or at least keep away the yawn threatening to break out. “What is it doing?”

“Sitting, mostly. It started up on the telephone pole and now its about eight feet from the window I’m watching it from. I think it doesn’t understand that it’s Thursday night.” A pause. “They pick up trash on Thursday morning, or late Wednesday. It’s still not great at disguises. Or maybe that's the point, dunno.”

“Do you feel like you’re in danger?”

“No more than usual.”

“Do you feel like it will move closer, or harm you?”

“Again, no more than usual. I’m usually pretty convinced things can and will kill me, so honestly? That’s probably a bad baseline. It won’t hurt me, I’m not useful if I’m dead. I mean, I assume that's why I’m not dead yet.” They watched it twitch, before it started melting slightly. “But it’ll probably move behind me if I don’t look at it. Or maybe it’ll go bother someone else that hasn’t spent an unreasonable amount of time staring at it.”

“You sound oddly confident, for someone who doesn’t trust what they know about it.” April thought she sounded a bit more amused than they felt about the situation. They hummed and she continued. “That’s probably a good thing, for you. If you feel safe--”

“I haven’t felt safe since I was born, but I know what you mean.”

“…Right. If you don’t mind me asking, what reason did the Usher foundation give for not taking your statement? Shadowy beings stalking you through out your life, it really should warrant at least an interview.”

They sucked air through their teeth and winced; partially because of the sonic experience that must have been and the memory of _that_ particular phone call.

“Again, they thought I was trying to pull a prank. It might have been what I led with, honestly.”

“Which was?”

The last bits of darkness dispersed from the driveway, and they could feel it moving through the crawlspace as they groaned.

“That there used to be a small door that sometimes existed under my bed, and sometimes didn’t? And that I’d see it a lot when I went places with my parents, places I didn’t know beforehand? And sometimes it would glow and make sounds like knocking or laughing?” A pause. “Yeah, I know how it sounds.”

There wasn’t a response beyond a crackly hum.

“Or the fact I followed it up with the people who don’t have faces? Or the ones that felt weird when they bullied me, always looking different but always having the same names? Or the spiders or how--” They glanced over, feeling the shadow sitting in the pantry, only to nearly yelp when they saw the clock. “Shit, it’s three am! Shit, shit. Er, sorry, I just.”

“Long distance is expensive, yes.” Gertrude sounded entirely unfazed, which was good. “If you can, I would like you to write out any other experiences you’ve had and mail them to me. I can get you the address here in a moment, alright? This way, if there’s feasibly any follow up we can possibly do, we’ll have an address to get back to you with. Or, at the very least, I can have the institute pay for the call next time.”

“Thank you, Ms. Robinson.” The feeling of relief was almost as heavy as the fatigue. They tried not to choke up, or yawn, or any strange combination of the two. “I’ll um. I’ll write it down, thanks.”

“Of course, dear. Now, once we get off the phone I want you to try getting as good a nights sleep as you can. All considered.”

The false concern was somehow less important than the fact she was willing to accept the rest of their story. Nothing interrupted either of them as April noted down the address and what format they should submit their statement in. They fell into bed as the sun was rising, and tried to ignore the shadow under their bed. They had earned this good nights sleep, and very little in the world would ruin it for them.


	2. I20: Paranoia as a Product of Experience

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time for canon divergence and office banter. Yaaay.

Mail received by the Institute generally got sorted out by the mail room, and then handed out by whomever had been most recently hired in any particular department. It was a sort of rite of passage to be able to accurately place mail where it needed to go, and promoted team building and getting to know one another. For the most part, this was viewed as an inoffensive and possibly even positive thing. The other part was, predictably, the Archival department.

It wasn’t so much that Gertrude and her assistants weren’t prompt about collecting the mail, it was more that anything marked specifically for the archives was moved into a plastic bin using tongs and gloves. For safety purposes. The whole place may have been filled with skeptics, but no one in their right mind would trust something with the archives as the recipient, because—short of artifact storage—that was one very good way to get cursed. The realness of curses aside, it was also a good way to have to be responsible for anything arriving in a less than perfect state. Gertrude Robinson was not known to be terribly understanding if envelopes came in reopened, even when it was because something tore on accident. Thankfully, it was her assistants collecting the mail, and more specifically it was usually Michael Shelley. The mail room staff were reasonably sure he’d dutifully carry a pallet of cinder blocks down to the archives if it were labeled for them. No one could really bring themselves to say if it was because he tended to roll with anything that happened, or if he was just oblivious. The possibility that he was brave fluctuated with how often he scared himself with the automatic stapler.

For his part, Michael was just content to be of use, and at that moment being of use meant collecting the mail and delivering it alongside a nice cup of tea to his boss.

Among the various letters—results from tests, written inquiries, responses to written inquiries—was an astoundingly beaten up booklet envelope. Gertrude turned it over a few times, and was not terribly pleased to see how loose the seal was, or the scrap of paper poking out of one of the corners. It appeared to have been posted from a town in Washington, though the handwriting of the addresses left a lot up to interpretation. It wasn’t hard for her to imagine that it was from that strange case of the Dark from several months ago. Honestly, she was rather surprised to receive a follow up at all—monsters weren’t known for their patience unless it got them somewhere, and if other powers were also interacting with the subject, she assumed time would not have been on their side. That, and they hadn’t been checking in at night recently, though she put that down to time difference more than anything.

Breaking the seal of the envelope freed the scrap of paper—printer paper, with the words ‘know to’ on it, a corner if she had to guess. Setting it carefully aside, she looked within and sighed heavily. Carefully, she poured the contents out onto her desk. Mostly, it was paper that looked like someone had sent it through a wall of box cutters. Mixed in with the frankly ridiculous number of paper scraps, was a half centimetre layer of cling wrap that seemed to have been between said box cutter wall, and the paper. All pulled apart like it was, there wasn’t much sense to be made. She certainly could Know where each scrap went together, but that would be a tad excessive. She made the executive decision to look through for anything that jumped out at her, and then send one of her assistants on the wild goose chase of figuring out what went where. After about four hours of shifting things around, she wouldn’t have said she was happy with anything she’d found, but a few of the scraps contained sentences and that was enough to move with.

_It laughs when I try to scream, and takes it away with more noise. I want to hurt it, Ms. Rob—_

— _never seen it open, and I hope I never do. It changes enough when it’s closed.  
—can tell when it’s there, because the spiders aren’t. They don’t like the lights._

_It watches me when I dream, as I die there over, and over. It watches from the sky and from body of Eyes as I scream, but cannot escape. There is only the Watcher to know what has happened._

Gertrude carefully packed all the scraps back into the envelope and tapped her nails against the desk. They were certainly something, she supposed. Worth looking into, at the very least. Not that the last one was a mystery in particular, given she’d seen the exact situation April had been describing, granted from the other side. Perhaps something was trying to tell her something. She decided to put that on hold until she could get the letter reconstructed.

Her assistants were, as usual, in various stages of their respective assignments. Emma and Sarah were out, she presumed, investigating in the field. Michael was typing furiously and slowly twisting pens into his hair when he paused to think about how to word something. He stopped typing rather quickly when he noticed she’d entered the room and gave a friendly wave, warm smile already spreading over his face.

“Hello Ms. Robinson! Was there something you needed?” A pen fell out of his hair, and he didn’t seem to notice. “I was just finishing up an email to that warehouse company mentioned in the Harrington file, I think I’ve got a lead we can use. It might take a stake out, if I can get permission, but if there’s anything spooky going on I’m sure we’ll find it!”

He looked extremely happy with himself, and seemed to be waiting for her to respond in the affirmative. Michael Shelley was a man quite fond of being useful. He found meaning and purpose in doing things that other people wanted him to do. This was very useful. He was also totally and blissfully unaware that the case he was talking about involved nothing more than carbon monoxide poisoning and extremely lax adherence to workplace safety regulations. This suited her just fine, if only because having someone who didn’t know enough to be truly afraid of something—should something real actually cross his path—was a very useful thing. He was not, however, content to just sit and be useful. He would try to be _helpful_ , and that ended up causing her more problems than anything else he did. It didn’t help that she had opted to keep up the doddering old lady act to encourage this, for practical reasons. It was really only an issue intermittently, because it was hard to school your tone when you had information to get after, but an intermittent issue is still an issue.

“Right, thank you Michael.” She made a show of looking around the room slowly. “Could you tell me where Eric’s gone? I rather think I could use his experience on something at the moment.”

His face had gone from elated to mildly distressed in the span of a few words, though he schooled himself rather well afterward.

“He said he was taking an early lunch, but I’m sure he’ll be in again shortly.” He idly twisted at a curl and jumped slightly when another pen fell out, clattering across the floor. It was a remarkable feat that he managed to keep a moderately straight face long enough to cover his embarrassed flushing. “I’m sure I could help get things rolling until he gets back, if you’d like! I can be a sounding board, if nothing else.”

“No, no that’s alright. I’ll just leave it on his desk, thank you.” After doing just that, she had turned and taken about three steps before turning back around. “Come to think of it, could you do a follow up call for me?”

“Yes, of course!” He beamed and shuffled some papers aside to locate a tiny notepad. He then hurriedly flipped from the first few pages—full of doodles of various small animals and the occasional movie monster—to a blank page. “No problem at all.”

She momentarily considered the ramifications of having Michael Shelley call to see if a young person had died yet or not. She decided that it was worth a bit of him moping around the office for a few days, if the news was as expected, verses one of the others. It was infinitely easier to predict what he would do, however, and that was preferable to much else.

“Wonderful. The number is in the May file, from a few months ago, along with other details to check up on. They’re on the west coast of America, so do remember to take that into account when you call.” She could physically see him doing the mental math while taking notes. “They were very concerned about their encounter, and I’m afraid the written follow up got damaged in the post. Its dated quite a while ago, and I’d like to see if they’re doing any better.”

“Of course. Is there anything specific you want me to ask after, or just a check on how they’re doing?” He’d already made a few notes and seemed excited to be doing something else.

“Just the usual questions, if you would. See if there’s anything else that’s developed since they called in. Do be careful with them, though, Michael.” He paused and looked concerned at her dip in tone, pen scratching a bit at the notebook margins. She gave him the best ‘concerned old woman’ face she could physically manage. “It seems no one else would believe them.”

“Oh.” He pursed his lips, eyebrows knitting together for a moment. She watched his hand tense and relax a few times around his pen before nodding. “Will do, Ms. Robinson. Anything else?”

“No, just remind Eric of the envelope when he comes in. I’ve written out what I want done, he should have it sorted in no time.”

* * *

Eric came back from lunch surprisingly early—three in the afternoon instead of five. Michael was rather proud of him. He’d intended to spend the rest of his workday sorting files, and instead came back to the archives to a nearly printed note on an envelope in abysmal shape and filled to the brim with paper scraps.

“What in the name of god’s left testicle does she expect me to do with _this_?”

“She did leave a note, I think.” Michael waved his hands nervously at Eric’s answering flat look. “I could help, if you’d like--”

“No Michael, what I’d like is for one thing in this place to be normal for _once._ _Just once!_ Or, at the very least, to not come back from lunch to have to play jigsaw with who knows how many pieces of paper!”

“Sorry…”

“It’s… it’s not your fault our job is like this.”

He sighed heavily and fairly fell down into his swivel chair. Eric was the only person Michael had ever seen spin in an office chair while still managing to look displeased, and honestly it was mildly distressing. Granted, Michael was also the kind of man to still ride the spinning teacups if given the chance, just for the sensation, so it was entirely possible that Eric just didn’t like the motion. Or, more likely he supposed, Eric just disliked anything that wasn’t fieldwork or making sure everything was where it could be easily found with his eyes closed.

“If it makes you feel any better, I’m calling the person that sent that in.” Michael offered, tucking in his legs a bit to spin for a moment. It was relaxing and if nothing else he’d have a few extra questions to ask, because goodness knows the follow up question sheet was not particularly long. The time consuming part of it was usually actually getting the information down on paper and the contact agreeing with what they just said. Eric looked up from where he was carefully separating corner pieces out from the mound of shreds and nodded before going back. “Anything specific you’d like to know, aside of why did it take so many pages for a follow up?”

Eric paused, brow furrowed, then looked at him slowly.

“This was a _follow up_? Michael, there’s no way in hell this was a follow up. A follow up would be a few pages, max. This…” He gestured vaguely to the pile of paper while trying not to waft any of it off his desk. “This isn’t even… statements don’t even take this much paper. Even if it’s all one sided, double spaced, fourteen point font, it shouldn’t be this much. Looking at the pieces I can read, its one and a half spaced at most, and that could just be because of a paragraph break messing with the formatting of that paragraph.”

“That’s… Gertrude said it was a follow up, and that's why she wanted me to call. I mean, the files’ pretty hefty on it’s own.” He’d stopped spinning at this point, and waited for the dizzy spell to pass before holding the half inch thick folder over. Eric didn’t quite know how to decipher the look on Michael’s face. “Apparently the Usher foundation hadn’t believed them, so quite a few things built up around the same… thing, so to speak. They apparently covered age six to current, at time of statement. Age wasn’t in the file, but Gertrude had a note about them sounding young, and they reference going to Uni.”

Eric snorted and flipped through the file, pointedly ignoring the pile on his desk.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and they accidentally sent us a paper instead of the statement. Or they’re already used to trying to make page requirements. Wait,” His eyebrows were dangerously close to the middle of his forehead and Michael wondered if that expression was painful. “A shadow monster followed them for at least four years? And they didn’t die terribly in the middle of the call? Or at least shortly after?”

“Eric!”

“Right, sorry.” He held up a placating hand, if only because his coworker had the ability to guilt the devil into a confessional if he actually managed to be offended by something. Offended was perhaps not the right word. It was always closer to feeling like you’d disappointed him, because he expected better from you. It wasn’t fun disappointing Michael, because then Eric felt bad and had to admit he was being an ass. He was much more comfortable pretending there wasn’t anyone here he cared about the opinion of. It didn’t help that Michael’d been a good person from the start and had managed to remain so, somehow. He didn’t deserve to be stuck here, not realizing he was in fact stuck. Eric flipped through a few more pages as the younger man transitioned from his ‘I am offended’ face to his ‘I am doing my best to look mad, but am in fact not’ face. “My point is, you’ve read the files where something dark and shadowy is involved. Things don’t usually turn out _well_ for them.”  
  
“Yes, I’m aware. That said, most of those were about a man saying the sandman came to cut his eyes out with sand, and Edmund Halley being an undead… cultist, thing.” He didn’t sound argumentative, so much as uneasy. “Or that one person with the blanket, which I know, isn’t _great_.”

“Of all the things to doubt in here, you doubt the fact those things were very much deadly?”

“It’s not like they could have been corroborated to be the actual cause of death! We don’t have any notes from Jonah Magnus saying it was true or not, for the historical! Not to mention, Hatendi’s death was ruled as due to a biological agent. It could have been a skin condition, for all we know. The pictures disappeared, so we don’t _know_ what happened.” Now he just sounded defensive as he looked intently down at his page of questions for later. He started picking at the corners of the page, pushing his nails through here and there. “And they at least seemed to think someone would believe them.”

“And you think, because the Institute believed them enough to write it down, that it can’t be a real thing?”

“I _think_ , that maybe we shouldn’t be assuming everyone’s going to be dead.” He appeared to be trying to stare a hole in his notes, lips pressed into a thin line. “And if that means not thinking about the idea of creepy monsters with—with—evil sand, I’m willing to go with that option.”

“Right. That’s fair.” It wasn’t the time to poke his coworkers buttons. He flipped through the last few pages of the file, where Gertrude’s public notes would be. There was remarkably little, aside of several tally marks, contact information, and notes to research the location of their home town. He vaguely remembered Sarah, the other week, going on about how it was a pain to research that area due to all of the flooding, wildfires, and general movements of the population. And that there had been two towns that sounded ‘frankly too close to one another’ to her, and he half wondered if it was a _where_ more than a _who_ issue. That said, the number of tally marks did not bode well for anyone in that area if it were in fact a _where_ issue. “When are you calling over? Can’t imagine it would be fun to talk about this stuff in the middle of the night.”

Michael perked up with the change in topic, and Eric could afford himself a moment to relax into the boring conversation of logistics for a bit. He did, idly, start back into the scrap sorting to keep his hands busy.

“I was going to call around six, actually! It’s far easier to call there than the other way around. Did you know they called in and gave Gertrude all that—at three in the morning? Well, that’s when she marked they ended, anyway. I can’t imagine sitting up like that if you’re convinced you’re being followed by a shadow… thing.” He gently kicked his heel against one of the chair wheels, letting his foot bounce up and down. Michael carefully took back the file and flipped through it again, as if he hadn’t spent a solid hour looking over it and taking notes. “Hopefully, calling them up during the day will help some.”

“Maybe. But calling at six would put them at ten, wouldn’t it?” Eric squinted down at a particularly ruffled scrap. “If they’re in uni, wouldn’t they have class?”

“True.” He bit his lip and looked at the clock on his computer, running mental math. “I could call earlier, I suppose. I just don’t want to be _that_ person that calls when you’re trying to sleep in.”

“You remember uni, Michael, no one sleeps.”

“Listen, I did the last half of my degree through night classes when I started working here. It _is_ possible, and I know the value of sleeping in when you can.”

“I can’t imagine you sleeping in. Too productive for it.” He’d gotten the top row of a page together and started looking for sides. “You’re always in here before Gertrude—who, for the record, I don’t think actually sleeps.”

Michael looked somewhere between flattered and displeased at the comment about their boss.

“It is, in fact, possible to sleep in and still get to work in the early morning if you set an alarm.” He made a note on his list to ask how May had been sleeping, as he imagined it wouldn’t be easy when most of the night seemed primed for an encounter. “Besides, it feels nice to get in, get the heater running, and make everyone something to drink. It makes everyone just a bit more comfortable.”

Eric hummed in response, not bothering to point out one of the fake office plants had drank more of Emma’s tea than she had in the last five years. He also glared flatly at a particularly bent section of corner that he was sure went somewhere, but there was no print and that could have put it almost _anywhere_.

“Still don’t think Gertrude sleeps. Just sits in a corner, staring a hole in the wall of a closet somewhere before coming in for the day.”

“Eric, please. She’s an old woman, not a robot.” His exasperated sigh threatened to push the papers on Eric’s desk. So did his turning to frown at him. “She’s just peculiar about things.”

“Would our boss not being human _really_ be the weirdest thing you’ve thought about while working here?” Eric had no real inclination if she was or not, but it wouldn’t have been a stretch to say the answer was no. That said, if he could get Michael on a tear about theories, he might get a good twenty minutes of entertainment out of it. “Aside of your theory about dryers being haunted.”

Michael slumped in his chair with a groan, covering his face.

“I made _one_ joke at _one_ holiday party.”

“It was the best joke of the party, to be fair. Much better than Elias trying to be chummy for twenty minutes about the new encyclopedias he’d looked into ordering. Do you remember that? Twenty minutes! On encyclopedias! I preferred when he turned up to the things stoned out of his mind.”

“I still can’t picture Elias doing any drug harder than antacids.”

“He did, trust me.” He snorted, shifting a group of pieces around to fit against what he had together. “But I asked for more strange theories, not Elias.”

He shook his head and sighed when another pen fell out. Thankfully, it was far less embarrassing for Eric to see it, if only because he didn’t seem terribly surprised.

“Theory: my hair makes pens.”

“How many did you get in this time?”

“Possibly more than six. I’ve found at least three. One fell out when Gertrude left the follow up, and I just about died.” He retrieved the pen and plunked it down into his pen cup. “I really should get something else to do with my free hand while I’m working. Typing at least keeps both busy.”

“You could just get one of those squeeze balls.” Eric made the gesture with his hand, on the very outside chance Michael had no idea what he was talking about. “The foam ones?”

“I feel like I’d just lose a stress ball, honestly. I’d put it down, it’d roll off, and I’ll find it in ten more years behind a shelf.”

“Tie a string to it?”

“How would I tie a string to a _ball_ , Eric?”

“Put a hole in it.” Michael stared at him for a long moment and threw an eraser at his leg, which bounced off and landed somewhere by the wastebasket. Eric had to try not to laugh, because he was _focused_ and also it would have been disastrous for the paper project. He did snort, though, and gave his coworker a quick smile before going back to work. “You did ask!”

“You aren’t _wrong_ , but how dare you.” There couldn’t have been less heat in the comment if they had been seated in Antarctica. “At least give me questions to ask, like I asked you for a half hour ago.”

“Fine, I dunno—ask if any weird things happened before the shadow showed up, or if it’s been noticed by literally anyone else? That’s a start.”

“Because that won’t make them think I’m doubting them _at all_.”

“You asked.”

* * *

Michael had a very short list of expectations for what the phone conversation was going to be like, once he actually decided to do it. Aside of occasionally having to hush Eric’s growing protests about the paper, he expected them to be cagey. Perhaps even a bit hostile, depending on how much sleep they’d been getting in the interim. His plan was to be as delicate as possible with them, and at the very least play it by ear as he did the follow up questions and asked after the letter they’d sent. If all went well, it would be a matter of twenty minutes, tops.

The way they answered the phone should have told him he was incorrect. The phone had rung exactly twice before being answered, and the only sound he could pick up at first was uneven breathing with a faint tapping behind it.

“May house.” Tense was the first descriptor that came to mind at the tone, if nothing else. “Who’s calling.”

It hadn’t been a question, so much as a very blunt statement. The bare minimum that counted for a greeting, and he didn’t know whether to be concerned. Not that this was a reason for _him_ not to be cordial.

“Hello, there. This is archival assistant Michael Shelley, with the Magnus Institute, calling on behalf of the head archivist. Is April there? I have some follow up questions to ask them.”

“… Right. This is them.” A pause, the tapping in the background getting a bit louder and increasing in tempo. “What’s the head archivists name?”

He had to admit he was taken a bit aback, honestly.

“Gertrude Robinson? Your file says you spoke to her on the phone, a little over a month ago?”

“Alright. Here’s the thing, _Shelley_.” He could hear something shifting around on the other end, and they sounded like they’d decided something. Also like they had put air quotes around his name, but he didn’t know how to feel about that. “I have been dealing with a lot.”

“I understand, your file said something about a shadow? I wanted to follow up--”

“I have been dealing with a lot of _bullshit_ , Shelley.” He sputtered on the rest of his sentence as they cut him off, and earned a raised eyebrow from Eric who looked like he was pondering burning things if the latest page didn’t fall into place instantly. April continued. “I need you to understand something. The shadow is _not_ the biggest concern I am handling right now. Currently, top of the fucking list is whether or not you are a: a real person, and b: anywhere fucking near who you say you are. You got a _face_ , Shelley?”

“I—” He honestly didn’t know how to respond to that one, but he was well aware of what paranoid sounded like. “I have a face, yes, and I assure you: I work for the institute.”

This got another glance from Eric, because that certainly was a sentence he had just said.

“It your face?”

“Yes, it is my face.”

“Is it real and were you born with it?”

“Yes, it is a real face and it is _my_ real face.” A pause, while he tried to find words that would perhaps make this go a little smoother. “I even have a scar on my cheek from when I fell off the swings in year three, at school.”

He was answered with a hum and more tapping, while Eric was fully looking at him now. He shrugged at Eric’s confused expression, before he’d gone back to the second page of paper reconstruction. This page was more of a challenge, because it seemed to have been cut in ten directions instead of the first pages’ six. He was also trying very hard not to wonder what in gods name would require Michael to confirm that he had a face.

“How old are you and have you ever broken a bone?”

“I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the institute--”

“Answer the question.” The firm sound to their voice was oddly compelling for being across the phone. They then sighed and seemed to grit their teeth a bit: “Please.”

“I’m thirty two, this last spring. Why are… I assure you, I’m human. I don’t know what else I would be, but believe me that I’m someone you can trust. To listen to what you have to say, at the very least, even if you don’t believe me beyond that.” Now was the point Eric slid over to Michael’s desk and started flipping through the file again, to which Michael frowned slightly. He wasn’t sure _what_ Michael was on the phone with right then, but it didn’t sound like a normal conversation and he just wanted to make sure there hadn’t been any large red notes in there about face stealing… somethings. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re nervous?”

“You didn’t answer the bone question.” They seemed to process the sentence as they said it, and sighed. “Listen, Shelley, let me do my checking because I am so _goddamn tired_ of shit not making sense, okay? I just want a series of answers to _help this make sense._ ”

Michael’s expression dropped.

“I understand. No, I’ve never broken a bone.”

“Why the fuck are they asking about your bones?” Eric hadn’t meant it to be a thing he said aloud, but it had been, and they all had to live with that. The surprised and mildly confused noise on the other end confirmed he’d definitely been loud enough to hear. Not that there was much hope they hadn’t heard him at that distance, anyway.

“Eric, please, I’m on the phone. Sorry, April, my coworker--”

“You have a coworker?” They sounded… relieved, instead of annoyed, which was good. Eric not so much, because he was looking at him very intently.

“Michael, why the _bones?_ ”  
  
“I don’t _know_ , Eric, but it makes them feel better, so I’m answering! Let me talk in peace!” Normally he wouldn’t have been so short with him, but the last thing he needed was to have to regain literally any of the ground he might have made in this conversation. “Sorry, again, April. He’s very bored.”

The last part was mean, yes, but Michael was already processing being asked if he’d had a face and didn’t need to make it worse.

“So, good news, bad news.” April’s tone had jumped a few shades lighter, and they even chuckled as they ended the sentence. He wasn’t quite sure what that was going to mean, exactly, but he was taking progress where he was getting it. “Which do you want first, Shelley?”

“I think we could all use good news, generally speaking.”

“Well, see normally you ask for the bad first, so the person can give you the good to bring you back to baseline. But, hell, if you’re playing optimist I can pretend, too.” They sounded a bit flatter, now, but not the suspicious tone they’d started with. He’d take it. “Good news is that I believe you, and I saw a spider today.”

“Yay?”

“Yes, yay. It’s fan-fucking-tastic, is what it is. Fucking phenomenal. Do you know how long it’d been since I saw a spider? Just a normal ass spider, hanging out on my wall? Guess.”

“I… don’t know how common spiders are, there, but… a week?” He also didn’t know what this had to do with anything, but he supposed context would have been in the bad news. He also supposed the sounds of them moving around were related to it.

“Two, actually!” They huffed a bit and rearranged the phone; he knew entirely because it rubbed against something. “Er, sorry. Oh, shit, sorry for swearing too. I’m so goddamn tired, Shelley.”

“I can’t imagine sleeping is easy, with the shadow.”

There was a long pause.

“Oh shit, right! That’s what you called for. I—I haven’t slept.” They’d started chuckling again, and he wondered if they were alright. “It’s been really hard, yeah. I—I don’t know what made it into the file, but uh. It’s gotten way, way worse.”

“I’m… sorry to hear that. Gotten worse, how? Is it doing more than following you?” Their response was a long, drawn out peal of laughter that he could only reasonably describe as manic. It slowly turned into choked back sobbing and he felt terrible for asking. “April, are you alright?”

After a moment of effort, they’d taken it down to sniffling and ragged breathing again.

“Sorry, I just. Not really. It’s… it’s in my head, I think. I—I've been having nightmares and… Every. Single. Time they get worse. It doesn’t just follow me, it… it hunts me. I’m always in that blue place I told Robinson about, but there’s houses and when I try to hide in one there’s nothing inside but black. Even the windows I break to get in, the broken glass melts into dark after a while. It hurts so much, when it catches me. I don’t know what it’s doing to make it hurt so much. Getting stabbed, or, or beaten—it doesn’t hurt like _that,_ you know? I wake up before I die, but I think… I think it’s doing this on purpose. It’s trying to make me not _sleep_ , so I’ll be too tired to keep calm, then I’ll get scared and then it’ll make a noise, and I’ll run and--” The breath they took sounded more like choking. Michael stayed quiet and let them breathe through it. He could hear the tears in their voice and the shuffling of them trying unsuccessfully to wipe their face without hitting the phone. “It hasn’t changed when I’m awake, and that. That scares me, so, _so_ much. I don’t know if it’s using my nightmares to learn before it puts me back in the blue and kills me, or… or if it’s going to kill me from exhaustion. God, I lead with interrogating you about your _face_ , then this. I must sound totally nuts.”

“It’s… well, it’s not _alright_ , but I understand.” He tried to keep his tone even, and comforting. “You sound like someone whose been through a lot. And I believe you.”

This brought another round of sobbing, though it sounded a touch more hysteric than manic. It took a good three minutes before they managed to breathe themselves calm again.

“Sorry, it’s just that no one ever—Thank you. Sorry, you… you had questions. I—I don’t know if I’m gonna be great at time frames right now.” They took a deep, steadying breath and let it out slowly. “The shadow hasn’t changed, for when I’m awake. It’s mostly the nightmares, now, and the… well, I sent you the statement on the other thing. Well, one of them. Shit, did that come in yet? I tried writing it so many times, but my hands were shaking _so bad…_ Then I had to type it, and _that_ felt like it took even longer.”

Michael looked over at the pile of paper scraps, and found Eric loitering in the space between their desks, apparently more interested in what he was doing than on working on anything. He shot the other man a look before focusing back on the notepad he’d hoped to have been following.

“We received a single envelope so far, so I’d say only one’s come in.”

“Does it have a stamp with an apple on it?”

“Err…” He reached around Eric and pulled over the envelope, turning it over to where the stamps sat. They were all crooked and some were faded, but there was indeed one with an apple. “Yes? In the corner, next to one with a duck.”

It sounded like they nodded before remembering it was a phone conversation. They cleared their throat awkwardly.

“Right, that’d be the first one. Next should be… honestly fuck if I know when the mail gets in. Sorry. Has anyone gotten a chance to look at it and can tell me what the fuck it is?” The sound he’d made was apparently not reassuring because their tone was extremely flat when they continued. “I’m taking that as a no.”

“It’s more that… well, you didn’t happen to have shredded it before you sent it, did you?”

This was followed by what Michael was reasonably sure was a solid two minutes of swearing and colorful vulgarities that he hadn’t really been able to track, if only because of vocal fry and what sounded like them turning away from the phone on occasion. Once it calmed down, he heard them take a deep breath.

“I hate doors.”

“I don’t--”

“The statement. It was about a door, one that exists, and then doesn’t, and then does again. It makes noises and changes colors, and goes where it really shouldn’t.” They took a shuddering breath before continuing. “It makes things that aren’t real, happen.”

A sort of glazed look crossed over his face as he auto-piloted his way through flipping the page on his notepad and clicking his pen.

“Explain the strange door.”

“First, I need you to understand that I experience auditory hallucinations. I sometimes hear shit that isn’t there. I check if a sound is real by snapping my fingers by my ear when it happens, and if it’s louder or closer than the snapping sound, then it’s my brain being a dick. I need to say that first, because I need you to know I know damn well what a hallucination sounds like. The door, it sounds like… Shit, man, you know how if you fray the wires on a speaker, and the sound gets super bad? Distortion, static, and crackle here and there? The door does that to any sound it makes. I’ve caught it in the field by the trailer park, in the middle of the wheat, echoing fucked up laughter. I’ve been alone in my kitchen and suddenly it’s half in my wall, making sizzling noises, before it jumps to my laundry room.” They took another deep breath and let it out. Michael became mildly aware that he’d been sitting up straighter and taking absolutely no notes whatsoever. “When I wake up from nightmares, screaming, and it’s there, it’ll… its like it takes it and plays my own screaming back louder and louder until I can’t handle it anymore and want to… Honestly, there’s not a pretty way to say this. It makes me want to rip my own skin off. I haven’t, yet, but it’s going to be a problem eventually.”

“Right.” He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and tried to relax his shoulders. “Does it do anything else?”

“...you don’t believe me.” They sounded incredibly small.

“I do, more than I can explain. I just… I have my questions, too.”

“Alright.” Another steadying breath. “It changes things, and I don’t mean just visually. I’ve walked into whole stacks of chairs that literally only seemed to exist when I ran into them, and then not a single person believed me about it. I _remember_ the chair leg to the gut, I know it was real. It’s also made it seem like somethings there when it’s not: handrails seeming longer than they really are, nails in stairs, and something watching from under my desk. It… do you know how much it hurts, knowing that the reality you’re experiencing is not the same as someone else, even a little? How much it hurts to point to things you _know_ are real, but apparently they _can’t_ be? Do you know what that’s like?”

Michael was quiet for a long moment.

“I do, yes.”

The sound they made in response was half between joy and a sound of pity.

“Thank you, and… I’m sorry about that. It’s… yeah. So: the door. I’ve never seen the thing open, but I assume it does. I mean, it has to—otherwise it’s not a door, it’s a block of wood. Doors, by definition, have to open. They also have to lead somewhere, if they’re not just… being stored somewhere. I… I don’t know if it’s better or worse that I sometimes think about what’s inside. I try not to, but it’s hard, you know? What I _do_ know, is that it’s probably really bad that I kinda want to take an axe to it, but mostly from a self preservation standpoint. Emotionally, I’m very pro-’axes to weird shit’ if it works out in the end. Unless you tell me that’s how to get rid of this thing, anyway. Then I’ll have to go find a, I don’t know, silver axe or something.”

“I absolutely cannot tell you to attack the spooky door. I honestly don’t think touching it in any way would go well.” That was a series of sentences he’d never expected to say, but this was his life apparently. Eric once again looked rather concerned, and he ignored him. “I… the thing I need you to remember is that you are real, and that you are alive right now.”

“I assume you don’t get a lot of phone calls from dead people, and far less calls being answered by them, so I guess so.” They’d drawled out their response, but there was an undercurrent of emotion creeping back in. “Is… is there anything you can tell me about these things? Anything? You’ve got a whole institute for this shit, right? There’s gotta be something about weird doors and creepy shadows.”

Michael opened and closed his mouth a few times, before sighing down at his forgotten notepad.

“The only thing I can tell you to do, is to be brave.” A pause. “I know, it sounds… like that, but from everything I’ve read, the people who make it out of these things do their best to keep together and not give into the fear. The second you give in is when they win. You can fight by staying alive, alright? And not knocking on the door with anything, even an axe.”

“Fighting usually involves more blood and physical contact than that, Shelley.” Their tone was flat and the tapping from before had returned in the background. A heavy sigh transitioned into the rest of their response. “But… I can try. I don’t know about brave, but I do know about not dying.”

He sucked in a breath and let it out, and pointedly ignored the look Eric was giving him.

“Was… Was there anything else that happened?”

They clicked their tongue against their teeth—or, he assumed that was the sound, it was hard to pin down—and hummed.

“That was the context for the good news, by the way. The spiders don’t show up when the door does. The louder or more overt it is, the less spiders. Sometimes one will be on the wall and hightail it out of the room, just before the door shows up on the wall. I saw spiders in the kitchen, on the counter. I, uh, might have climbed up here when I was asking you things. For safety.”

“You climbed on the counter, because there were spiders on the counter.” Yeah, that seemed in line with the rest of their conversation so far. They huffed into the phone and then made an indignant sound.

“Listen, if it’s safe enough for a spider, it’s damn well safe enough for me.” They seemed oddly defensive about it, which given the correlation between the door and the spiders, he understood. He also picked up the sound of more intense tapping. “Anyway, the bad news I was going to get to was, uh, about the second letter.”

They went quiet long enough to worry him, aside from the tapping.

“April?”

“I don’t know if it made it in the file, but over the last few years some very much not human things have been wandering around. There’s two types I’ve noticed. One of them are like… you ever seen one of those artists drawing models? The little wooden ones, with joints? They look like that, but people sized. No face, solid wood, wear clothes. No one else seems to realize they’re… not normal people. I’ve never seen one eat. I’ve never seen one breathe. They make the noises, mime the actions, and even talk—but they’re not human. I think they know that I know they’re different. It’s… they don’t have eyes, but it’s real easy to tell when somethings looking at you for long enough. You don’t need eyes to see things, I guess. Or a pulse to be evil.” They shuddered audibly. “They’re not as bad as the ones with skin, the… the kids. Hopefully that one _will_ make it through because I don’t have the energy to describe… _that_ more than once in my life, if I can help it. Anyway, my point: the bad news was that they came to my house. Normally I only saw them in town, which is literally about ten miles away. Last week, I think it was last week—again time is really bad right now—I looked out my window and saw one. It was just stood in the driveway, and I could feel it watching the house. My parents keep getting pissed off that I keep locking the doors when they leave, but I think I’m just doing it for a little denial about them getting inside if they want to. It’s not like I’m going to class anymore, not with… all this.”

“Do you think these… not people will hurt you?”

“Yes. I know they can, and will if given the chance.”

“Do you want to tell me how you know?”

“I—” A long silence, with the tapping cutting out and their breathing getting heavy again. “No.”

“Do you think you can be brave, until we get the file and Gertrude can find some way to help you?” Michael’s voice was very quiet, now, and he wondered if this counted as a lie. Ghosts, he believed in, and he knew an exorcism could work against the worst ones. He had always assumed there were things outside of his ability to understand—that had been the whole _point_ of getting a job at the institute—but there was _limit_ to what that could stretch to. There had to be. He’d read files, done follow up, heard Sarah talk about what she and Emma ran into out in the field. But none of this sounded like something that could be fixed with a few ‘Hail Mary's and some holy water. Or fire. And he honestly couldn’t imagine Gertrude having many options to offer them for this. It hurt, thinking about it. Because, honestly, it all felt a lot like not believing them, just because he didn’t have an answer. There might not be one, and he didn’t know if he had the ability to explain that without hurting them and leaving them alone with all… that. So, he continued to do the thing that felt a lot like lying. “I need to know you’re going to be brave.”

This silence stretched just long enough that he was about to check on them before they sighed.

“I don’t have much other choice. Die, or tough it out. Not a wide variety of options.” Deadpanning, he assumed, was better than hysterics or sobbing. “I’m going to be brave. I just—I want you to promise me you’re going to pass this along, Shelley. I need to know there’s a light at the end of this tunnel. That at the end of this, I’ll come out knowing more than what I went in with. Or, at the very least, someone’s gonna.”

He tried to ignore the implications of their metaphor and pressed on.

“I promise, and I will do everything I can to help you.” It wasn’t a lie if he couldn’t do anything, was it? It was, and he knew it in the pit of his stomach. He could feel the distaste of it in there, too. He decided this was the best time to flip back to his questions and try to work back into something he was used to handling. “Is there anything else that you want me to pass along? Anything new?”

“I… the Watcher is new.” They sounded extremely tired now, and he wondered just how long they’d actually been without sleep. “When I have my nightmares, there’s always three things in them. Me, the shadow hunting me, and the watcher. I'm calling it that anyway, it's not like it's introduced itself. I don't think it could, if it wanted to. It’s… it’s full of eyes. I don’t mean like… like a jar is full of eyes, or it just has a lot, I mean… In my statement I called the shadow a black hole because there was no light inside it. This, it was like it was all eyes all the way through. I only know because the eyes move when I walk around it, and they look around. When I look from it, to the sky, it’s… it’s always one of two things. A thick, terrible overcast like it was when I was in the blue space before… or a crystal clear view of an eye, miles and miles across. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s always been there, and I didn’t know, or if it was only when the shadow got in my head. I think it’s the shadow, making things worse and always watching where I am, because it always follows me. I don’t know. I don’t know and _I hate it_. Are there any more questions? I’m… so tired.”

“No, that’s all I needed.” He’d managed to take notes on that part, at least. He could always write down what he remembered after something to eat and some time to think. Maybe a drink, or just going to bed, really. Michael decided to focus on just finishing the phone call. “I’m going to pass this all on to the archivist, and see what we can dig up for you. You’re going to make it through this.”

“Well, I said I would try, so I suppose I have to.” They yawned, and were extremely unsuccessful at covering it. “Sorry. I just… I’ll call in again if something new happens. It’s a pain in the ass, but I figure my parents are already pissed off. Might as well add more to it.”

“I… don’t know about angering your parents, but I do think calling in would be helpful. At the very least, someone here can talk you through what’s going on.” He scribbled a note in the corner of the page to tell Rosie to set their number up to forward to the archives. He didn’t know if that was a thing that was possible, but it made him feel better about the whole situation. “Is… is there anything else you need from me, before I hang up? I’m sorry I haven’t really been able to help as much as you’d hoped.”

“I mean, if you do have a magic axe you can ship over, that would be great.” Another yawn they didn’t bother to cover. “Nah, if something jumps me either I’ll call or it won’t really be my problem anymore.”

The certainty in their tone made him shift uncomfortably.

“Right. I suppose I can’t tell you to get a good nights’ sleep, all considered, but I do hope you have at least a nice day.”

“I… Thanks, Shelley. I’ll try. Tell your coworker I’m sorry for being more interesting than whatever he’s working on.”

“I will, and I don’t think it’s as much of a problem as it sounds like.” He felt slightly better that he was able to smile at that, if only because now they had a rapport built up. “Goodbye.”

The millisecond the phone was back on the cradle, it felt like every stitch of tension fell out of his body and he proceeded to melt out of his office chair. This, understandably, was immediately followed by Eric trying to keep him from getting to the floor. Partially because it looked a lot more concerning than it _was_ , and partially because Michael only ever made it to sitting on the floor when everything got a bit too much. It was never fun to watch, and honestly Eric’s whole prevention plan for it was ‘keep Michael upright’.

“No floor time, what happened?” He got a look in response that was a mixture of mild anxiety, discomfort, and exhaustion. “Are you alright?”

“I think I need forty hours of sleep, half a bar, and at least one sandwich.” He didn’t seem impressed with Eric’s lack of response to that, while he was being held up under the arms like some sort of displeased cat. It wasn’t great, pretty much all the way down. “Can you let me just sit on the floor, please?”

“When you sit on the floor, you freak out.”

“I sit on the floor _when_ I ‘freak out’.” Michael was much too drained to try reexplaining what anxiety was. “It helps me calm down. Now drop, _please_.”

“Fine.” Eric didn’t drop him, so much as let him slide down so he was sitting, before he pressed his forehead pressed against the cold metal of the desk. He’d taken a few deep breaths by the time Eric retreated to his chair and wheeled back behind his desk so he had a clearer line of sight on him. “OK, so, again: what the fuck was that?”

Michael held up a finger and took some more deep breathes, before turning around to lean against the desk. It was much easier to be grounded on the, well, ground.

“I’m going to need a look at that statement, when you’re done. It’s about a door. I can… give me a few minutes and I’ll try to write up the call summary for you. They’re not doing great, I don’t think.”

“Alright, sure, fine— _why did they ask about your bones_?”

Michael managed to look at him blankly for a second, before rubbing at his face and leaning back against the desk.

“They thought I was one of the monsters that’s after them.” A pause as he processed what he’d just said, before continuing. “Apparently some of them look like wooden people, and talk. I think they just wanted to see if they could tell if I was one or not. I think you talking in the background convinced them, so _yay._ ”

The yay was not enthusiastic.

“So, their logic was that evil can’t have cross-talk?”

“I don’t _know_ , Eric!” He narrowly avoided hitting his hand into his chair and desk, as he flailed an arm at the older man. “They were _scared_. Scared people do all sorts of things to try to comfort themselves. It doesn’t always make sense.”

“Fair.”

They sat there quietly for a while, Eric going back to sorting the paper with renewed curiosity and Michael trying to not work himself up about what Ryan would have said about how he handled all of that. He’d almost worked himself into a fine lather over it by the time Gertrude passed through on her way home for the evening, and he was glad for the fact that she probably couldn’t see him on the floor. Not that it helped when she paused by Eric’s desk, most definitely able to see him if she happened to look.

“It’s coming along, then?” Eric gave her an absolutely withering look from where he was now half way through the next page. She either didn’t notice, or much more likely she didn’t care. “Have you gotten anything from it?”

“ _Along_ would be one of the politer words from what it is, Gertrude. But, yes, thankfully for you, my stint into puzzles helps you yet again. Hurrah, for the archive.” Her expression didn’t change, and he was reasonably sure his didn’t either. “Apparently its about a door. That’s all I have so far. Going to go out on a limb and say it’s not a normal door… but you know that, don’t you? That one of the tally's in the file, or were you just counting how long it took for them to be done talking?”

At this, Gertrude sighed and was almost able to keep all of her annoyance off her face.

“If May’s still alive, which Michael will kindly confirm for us in his write up, then it’s perfectly fine that there’s nothing else yet. Really Eric, if you think I sat there playing tic-tack-toe with myself while that poor child told me their tale, I’m quite sure that says more about you than it does about me.” She idly straightened her jacket sleeves and gave him another, more aggressively mollifying, look. “I really had hoped you’d have moved on from all this hostility.”

“If I didn’t have to work here, maybe I would have.”

“We both know that it wouldn’t have done you any better to run off and, what, tend Mary’s bookstore while she was away on one of her wild adventures?” Her eyes were cold even if her voice was conversational. Eric had begun grinding his teeth together. “It’s not my fault, Eric. Now, if you’re done being sour--”

“I’d hardly call this _being sour--_ ”

“Whatever you call it, it’s done for tonight. Don’t forget to get some sleep in, you look _tired_.”

With that, she left the archives and Michael could almost feel the anger coming off of Eric.

“Are you--”

“Going to say she’s right, Michael? Say that was just her being _particular_?” Eric’s tone was sharp enough to make Michael flinch, and he felt bad almost immediately. Almost, being the operative word. Some things you can’t just sit through and just as much as he didn’t know how to handle anxiety, Michael didn’t know how to handle his anger. It still felt rotten, though. “Sorry, I.. I shouldn’t take this out on you. Are you feeling any better?”

He had a sad sort of unimpressed look to him before he sighed and pulled himself off the ground.

“Well enough to to write up that summary, at any rate.” He wasn’t, really, but it was something to do with his hands. Eric frowned at the lack of acknowledgment, but that wasn’t the point of an apology, and so moved past it as Michael sat back down in his chair. He wiggled his mouse a bit to wake up the computer and opened a new document, not entirely pleased with the clock in the corner saying it was eight in the evening. “At the very least it’ll put a pin in tonight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sure do write a lot of phone conversation for hating writing them.   
> My love of banter is larger, though, so there's that.


	3. O63: Attack as a Means of Defense

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for canon typical Stranger shenanigans and also a very frank approach to being raised to have a really skewed view of violence in general.  
> It's a "working through some shit" chapter yall, but there's banter at the end so yay

Statement of April May, regarding encounters with beings they have named the “not children”, specifically the being called Homer Tanner. Incidents detailed occurred between September 1990 to March 1999, at time of writing. Location of incidents varied, primarily centered in eastern Washington state, USA, approximately 50 miles south of the Canadian Border. Time of writing is February 6th 2002\. Recorded by subject.

* * *

I want to be perfectly clear about this before I start: I know what a corpse looks like. Now that that’s out of the way, I should explain a bit about what a notchild actually is.

From what I’ve been able to learn over the last twelve years, they are former children that have been altered into some form of inhuman creature that is intent on mimicking what it used to be. They consist of preserved skin, human hair, teeth, glass eyes, and sawdust around a metal wire frame. I don’t know the exact composition beyond that, because no matter the level of evidence to the contrary, literally no human in the world would see someone digging around in what looks like a corpse and think “this is normal and fine.”

Even when damaged, they seem extremely adept at making people in authority not notice the peculiarities. I don’t know if it’s an extension of people seeing what they want to see, or if they posses some sort of ability to make things appear differently than what they are. I have support for the idea that they have something like this at their disposal, which I will clarify later.

I generally identify them by their eyes, and if I haven’t been able to get a clear look, their smell. Their eyes, obviously, are entirely lifeless aside of the occasional look back and forth. They don’t, however, seem to know how to mimic rapid eye movements or the constant wandering of the pupil around their surroundings. Their eyes are also too dry. This is harder to discern, unless you’re particularly fond of marbles, or glass work. There is a sheen to them, as you would expect, but not the _correct_ one. It’s a polished glass shine, and not the wet glint of membrane. I don’t think they actually contain any moisture inside themselves, and am rather pleased they haven’t found a way to mimic it yet.

As for the smell: there is almost always an overwhelming scent of tobacco smoke. There doesn’t seem to be a consistency to what kind of smoke, just that it has to be fragrant and clinging—making their habit of chain-smoking entirely unsurprising. This is, I assume, to cover the smell of chemicals that otherwise follows them. Some exceptions exist, but they are either rare or not something I’ve encountered. There was one I met in high school that smelled entirely of weed smoke, though that might have just been an adaptation to the new setting and new appearance. I say adaptation, instead of instance, because I am not entirely convinced that they are not in fact simply changing skins when they move on, one breaks down or is damaged.

This is supported by at least three encounters I have had with one Homer Tanner, over the span of several years.

I first met the thing calling himself Homer Tanner in kindergarten, when he had decided to take my crayons. This, I know now, was probably an extension of his act to keep passing as a normal child—their ruse doesn’t work if they stand out too much. The smell was strong enough to be noticeable, but he was otherwise unremarkable. At the time, I simply assumed his parents smoked heavily, and that he was a bit of a prick. Neither of those things were uncommon around town, so I simply told him to fuck off and leave me to my cat drawing. His response was to push me, I responded by slapping him, and that’s when I first noted the texture difference to them.

Their skin, as you can imagine, does not feel normal. Whatever you might think preserved human skin wrapped around sawdust feels like, I can assure you that you are wrong, though perhaps not entirely so. I could compare it to leather that hadn’t been oiled in a while, but that would be incorrect—it doesn’t have the dead skin consistency to it at that point. More accurate would be to describe it as if you’ve washed your hands too often without using lotion in between. Not quite at cracking, still holding together, but the very outer layer isn’t entirely keeping on there. Slick, but only because there were no longer any tiny creases or bumps to get friction going—the finer details I have always assumed were destroyed by the sawdust. This causes them problems when it comes to fine motor control, and I think that’s part of why they pose as children. Pressure can get you far in terms of holding things, but fine control of your body isn’t expected from small children and that’s easier to hide behind.

After being sent out into the hall for hitting him, I found one of my nails had torn a bit of his cheek off. Not enough to have been noticeable to others, or to have torn him open, but enough that it should have been painful. The skin smelled terrible. At the time I hadn’t smelled formaldehyde or anything else like it, so I had no context for why it made me gag. I assumed he must be sick somehow, and decided that I wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up because fuck him, honestly. Not very academic, but I didn’t have the patience back then to sit and ponder why he smelled like that beyond if the smell would come off.

The next time I saw him, was on the playground, where most things tended to go wrong. He and a pair of others I assumed were his friends decided they were going to teach me a lesson about sharing my things. They all smelled terrible, and not a single punch they pounded into my face and stomach felt right.

I don’t mean emotionally, or morally: I’d been punched before, and have been many times since—there is a certain feeling to knuckles hitting your insides. A surprising amount of sharpness around the edges of a blow to your gut while your nerves try to figure out which one gets to feel the knuckles, while your lungs try to work through the shock. Face shots were more your skin and muscles getting pressed hard between your skull and their hand. Pointed, like a corkscrew stabbing in and twisting, there. There was always a twist to the hand, because the arm rotates as it jabs forward, and it pulls your skin with it slightly, as they connect and pull back. That didn’t happen, it was a straight back and forth motion—I don’t think I’d ever so badly predicted how punches were going to move since that fight. I think the strangest thing about it, in retrospect, wasn’t the weird stances or the lack of arc to their punches. It wasn’t even the speed they were able to pound at me with. It was that the blows absorbed more of their own shock—with no reaction from my attackers at all. Not even a grunt.

In a normal person, if they throw a punch, that impact is going to ripple back up their arm. They’re going to fatigue themselves or hurt something. There is literally no way to cancel this out completely, because physics is a thing that exists. There are very few places where Newton’s whole deal is in play as much as a brawl. It’s why fighting is normally not a really drawn out situation, no matter how much time you want to spend beating something into someone. Muscles get tired, joints start to ache, and its totally possible to overdraw a punch and pull something. Even if you do it right, you’re going to get tired and sore from rebound and whatever you catch in the meantime—not to mention all the motion that goes into avoiding getting hit. It’s not something you do without losing energy. Every decision you make in a fight is about having more energy in the end than your opponent, because he who isn’t in too much pain to continue, usually wins. Barring someone with a weapon, or who’s really good at using their second wind, anyway. At that point in time my method was using pain deterrence—if you make someone hurt enough, fast enough, without doing much actual _harm_ , you’d give them something to think about without ruining them for life. It was _effective_ and gets a point across. It saves energy, because sometimes you get someone like myself who is so used to being hurt—either because their parents are terrible, or because that’s just their life—and you will need to switch to more damaging blows because that’s all that will deter _that_. I remember not liking going for absolute damage because it made me tired and it also was a pretty good chance I’d ruin someone’s body for life. You can change a shitty person, eventually, if they want to change. You can grow after being a terrible human being. You can’t grow out of someone putting their thumb through your eye, for example. It’s a terrible, violent for violence’s sake, way to fight. Any fight can kill someone, it’s something you have to accept that when you find yourself in that situation. On the other end of it, someone could be dead. Someone could be paralyzed. Someone’s spine could snap at the neck and they lay there suffocating because their brain can’t tell their lungs to breathe. It could be you. That’s why I liked the deterrence method. Blows to the shoulder to make your arm a pain to use, not going to kill you. Hits to a spot in your thigh that makes the nerves flip out and make you hit the ground, not going to kill you unless you’re really unlucky. I never let anyone hit the ground on anything but grass. I mostly fought bullies, and they were just dumb kids like I was. No one deserves violence, but that’s the only way I knew how to help other dumb kids at the time, and so that’s what I did. I’d gotten well into the habit of being in pain, by then. Most fights didn’t _hurt_ anymore. Hard for kids to measure up to lead pipes and twenty somethings, I guess.

This fight, though, it was like I was getting beaten by a punching bag. Not a heavy one, mind you, because even if you pack sawdust really tight it’s only going to be _so_ heavy in the body of a six year old. But they hit like a goddamn battering ram. Every. Single. Time. No hesitation after a blow, just pulling back and hitting again like it didn’t mean anything to them. There was no pausing for breath, no flinching because they feared pain from the experience, and no real expression of exertion. They didn’t even slow down as it went on, which you almost have to bide your time for normally, because otherwise everyone’s at full energy and that's when normal people get really hurt. Their knuckles weren’t sharp. They didn’t feel like they had bones, but blunt force isn’t great for checking out a skeleton and I was _six_. I don’t think I would have known what a metacarpal was if you’d offered me fifty million dollars for a correct guess.

Physically, it wasn’t a terribly difficult fight. I don’t think they expected me to know how to handle myself, or foresaw my decision to go for absolute damage when I saw they didn’t flinch. I hate that I had to make that flip, but I honestly think I would have died if I hadn’t.

I don’t know how Homer hid it later, but I know I shattered one of his eyes. A normal person’s eye, well, they’re squishy. They can take a lot of blunt trauma if you’re not aiming specifically for them. Glass can too, but it doesn’t have the luxury of malleability. This makes it fragile, specifically if you get it between the ground and your fist, over and over. Just pounding on it till something shatters and the area around it gets all soft, because there’s not enough sawdust left inside for structure. I think that’s when one of the others had tried to choke me on my own hair. At the time, I wore my hair in a braid down my back and they used that against me. Thankfully, they didn’t seem to know how to hard to actually pull on it—they overestimated it and ended up losing grip after they’d hauled me to my feet. That gave me room to push the two standing, back a bit. I think at that point, my hand was bleeding from the glass and my brain was yelling about the situation being wrong, but not what about it was wrong. I wasn’t in thinking mode, at that point. It wasn’t the time for evaluation—spending time thinking in a fight is how you end up dead.

I had stomped on Homer’s stomach before going to kick one of his friends, and he stopped me. Normally he’d have been fifteen shades of bloody and trying to keep his head in one piece. Normally. Instead, he was pissed off, glaring with one eye, and probably not happy about the fact he was leaking a _lot_ of sawdust on the blacktop. He had a hold on the leg I’d stomped with, and one of his friends hit me with an uppercut that put my bottom teeth through my lip. Luckily, Homer’s throat was where my foot came down after the blow, and he must have decided that was enough loss at the moment. The other two were far easier to handle once Homer pushed me off, scrambling off toward the gate leading out of the playground. One ran after him, and the last one stuck around until I tore his ear off. I believe most of his face came with it, but I don’t recall what happened to it after it hit the ground.

It wasn’t a difficult fight, physically. Emotionally though, I had no idea what the hell I had just experienced. I had glass in my hand, driven in much deeper than originally because of all the punching. I was bleeding from the mouth and nose, my ribs were screaming, and every joint in my arm felt like I’d been lit on fire. That I could ignore. That was physical. I couldn’t, however, process why I was covered in sawdust instead of blood. Why there were piles of it on the blacktop, or why no one had done anything while these other kids were beating the shit out of me. Normally there was usually a crowd of kids wanting to watch someone bleed, at the very least. Maybe a whole two people telling combatants to calm down. Someone screaming for a teacher to come stop it. I couldn’t figure out why nothing of the sort was happening. It didn’t _make sense_.

All that I knew was that once the notchildren were gone, suddenly the playground monitor—a teacher with nothing else better to do during recess—was heading my way. They hadn’t been far from where the fight was happening, but they hadn’t noticed until then. I remember them looking confused and mildly horrified. I still don’t know if it was from whatever the sawdust looked like to them, or if I just looked that bad.

I got to sit in the principals’ isolation room until my parents could come talk to the principal about me fighting on the playground. I was there the whole meeting and I still don’t know how it was decided I’d been fighting, or with whom, since it was said very clearly that no one saw the fight and none of the other kids came forward saying they were in it with me. The only evidence they had of an altercation was me, still kind of bleeding because the nurses’ answer to all of it was a roll of paper towels, and the blood in the sawdust outside. I think the principal decided that the custodian had put out sawdust to soak the blood, after it all happened. Pointing out that my blood would have been under it in that case, wasn’t taken well. Or asking what happened to the face. I distinctly remember Homer’s family being brought up, and being told that his parents were doing a lot, monetarily, for the school and that my family should be careful. I didn’t think it was a threat, at the time, but my parents seemed to think it was.

I was grounded, no going outside except for school, with no books, or TV that whole week. I think it was more because dad was angry that I hadn’t been defending anyone, and it just looked like I’d went off on someone. He’s the one that taught me how to fight, you see, and how to end one very quickly and _permanently_ , if I needed to. I had to learn that a permanent end to a schoolyard brawl wasn’t a _great_ idea, on my own. Don’t think he liked that either, probably took it as me chickening out or something. I think he could have also been angry I got caught. He’s strange like that.

I remember spending the time wondering if I’d imagined the whole sawdust thing. Made up some disjointed mess to cover for someone being good enough to hide that they got into it with me, while I looked like I’d been hit by a truck. I think I decided it had happened, because I had seen it and felt it. I would forget things I was told, a lot, and I couldn’t read at that point so I focused on visual things. Television that taught me things, things I could see and process as they were explained. That fight sat in my bones, I think, not just my head—and it taught me something I could probably have lived my whole life without knowing.

I had _learned_ that day, that things exist that I did not understand and that others seemed willing to ignore, and I had to trust what I had learned. It would be dangerous, even deadly, not to remember it. I assume this wasn’t the lesson Homer had hoped to teach.

The next time I saw Homer was a week and a half later. He’d been gone for a solid week, and for the half after, I’d been told not to be around him so I didn’t try particularly hard to see what he was up to. When I did see him on the playground next, it wasn’t him. To clarify, it used his name, and I believe it was the same entity. The problem was, he was wearing an entirely different person. He’d gotten a bit taller, a bit thinner, and had new eyes. They didn’t look right, dull, and the smell was fresher. The skin was softer looking. Newer, in all that implies. Voice was the same, though.

He was alone at the time, and I became increasingly aware that no one seemed to be looking in the direction of the tree we were underneath. I remember that I’d sat down under it because I was tired—the arch of my foot was still bruised from all the kicking I’d tried to do and that makes standing a lot harder. I honestly have no idea when he got there, or how long he stood there watching me, just that when I glanced in that direction he was suddenly there. He saw me looking around, and smiled—to date he had the widest smile I’ve seen a notchild have. They don’t usually smile, it creases the skin and that leads to cracking. I remember being entirely too aware that he had teeth. I don’t know if they came with the skin. I don’t think they all came from the same person, at least, because there were far, far, too many. A few rows, at least, when he opened his mouth. I still don’t know how they all stayed in there.

He asked me if I was afraid. I asked what I’d have to be afraid of, because I hadn’t quite put it together at that point—my powers of observation at the time usually depended on how scared I was. He’d feigned surprise and asked how I could forget his face, how I could forget _him_. For a moment, I just assumed I’d met someone and promptly forgotten them because my brain was, and is, bad with people. Unless they’d left a particularly significant impact on me—physically or mentally—i often remembered nothing about someone when they left my field of vision. I didn’t mean to, it just… happened. My lack of response seemed to amuse him, and he smile again, with his too many teeth.

“It’s me, _Homer_.” He said, and I remember the pain from clenching my fist in response. I remember my brain racing to make it make sense, because I did remember his voice then. It had matched and it _shouldn’t have_ because this was not Homer Tanner. It couldn’t have been and there was no way for it to be, and yet here he stood. Grinning and watching my face with his new, flat, eyes.

I remember that I was afraid. I don’t know of what, specifically. I don’t _like_ being nonspecific. I did not, and do not like feeling like I missed something. The whole situation felt wrong, and maybe the wrongness was the point, because that smile just kept getting wider and wider. I don’t remember what he said after that, because all I could hear was the sound of blood rushing in my ears. All I could think to do was make the thing that didn’t make sense disappear.

And I only had so many options for doing that.

The good news was I’d recently learned how to fix a broken nose, the bad news was that I had to use that knowledge, after the fight that took place. I was one handed, and I was still a six year old child with an assortment of wounds. Pain deterrence might not have worked on him, but it sure did work on me. He didn’t seem to be going for the kill, that time, just making me hurt. I remember running—maybe limping in fast forward would be a better description—and I remember every single teacher I went to for help looking at me like I was crazy when I said what had happened. Most of the teachers didn’t like me anyway, for probably obvious reasons, and I suspect my story about the sawdust child in another kid’s skin didn’t win any favors.

The nurse didn’t even let me into her office, that time. I got a chair outside and some tissues for my nose, and where the holes in my lip had reopened. My parents weren’t called, and I don’t think they were surprised about it, later.

The next actual encounter, aside of passing one in the halls or out in town, was in fifth grade. I was ten years old, and trying very hard to read more than fight. I had decided, after Homer, that I wasn’t going to give into any more violence. This didn’t happen, of course, but the thought had been there. And, until that year, I’d kept it to at least flesh and blood scumbags. More slapping than punching, and my reputation had started deterring more people than me doing anything.

It remains a horrible feeling, knowing that people you’d never even met would recognize you and feel the fear of god in them, not even at what you’ve done, but what you _might_ do. Even the kids I ended up defending, that I ended up getting beaten so bloody I couldn’t see straight for, had that look to them when they saw me. Made me sick, sometimes, and it still does. But it kept people mildly safer, broke up more fights than I had to get into, and it meant I could relax. Well, I could try to, anyway. Being hated with people safe, I felt at the time, was preferable to being loved and having people in danger. There’s a sort of arrogant bravery that comes with that, too. At the time I liked it. It made me feel like nothing could actually get to me while I tried to go about being a normal kid. That said, I was still cagey. The shadow had made it difficult to let people walk behind me without freaking out about being followed. Made me hyper-aware of the few people looking at me, that thought they could gain some reputation for trying to take out the monster of the school. Some even tried it, and they all failed—even if they beat me until I couldn’t move, they always came out worse. By that point, though, it was rare.

So, most of my time in school not spent trying to learn in spite of teachers ignoring me, was spent making up for that by reading. It was all I could afford to do, really, but going outside meant I couldn’t do that. See, the school had decided students could stay inside during morning recess if we got approval from the librarian, but everyone was required to go outside after lunch. They’d also decided students weren’t allowed to take books outside with them at lunch, unless you owned said book. My parents had only ever bought a single book relating to me, and that was a baby book that never got filled in past the first three months. All of these things combined into recess for me being a forty five minute span of people watching, with digging being a rare exception. It was peaceful, if boring. I liked it, compared to most other things.

Enter Homer.

Once more, he had a new face—at the time, I had comforted myself with the idea that maybe he’d fallen into some piece of farm equipment and come to a painful end. Logically, it was because what is dead cannot grow and children tend to do a lot of growing. It would make sense that the various notchildren were passing skin around like a bowl of popcorn as they supposedly aged, but I much prefer the idea that they dispose of the skin after one use. Because it is easier to process the idea of a handful of children being murdered, and then allowed to rest, than it was to process the idea that a whole horde of children had been murdered and the skins were being continually reused as costume jewelry. One ends out with marginally fewer nightmares, anyway.

Homer was, at that time, thankfully not focused on me. Unfortunately, that meant he was focused on someone else. Specifically, he was focused on the kids doing their best to dig to the center of the earth, in a section of playground. That section was at the bottom of the largest hill, out of the way of anyone’s foot traffic, with soil that was mostly clay. In the winter the hole would get filled in, and the staff would let us sled down the hill during recess. During all other times that the ground wasn’t frozen, there was a rotating cast of people enthusiastically digging with anything they could find. I know Homer was interested in this place, because the hole was one of the very few places I was content to exist around.

It was peaceful, just moving dirt from one place to another, feeling it under your nails, and the grit on your skin. Making progress you could see. It wasn’t a straight up and down affair, either, the hole. We’d gone down about four feet and started digging right, into the hill itself. By that time, we had a nice little divot just large enough to sit in, and be shaded from the world. It was always peaceful down there, and I think the other kids wanted to make a cave of it. I know it would have been a terrible idea, but what kid doesn’t want to dig out and live in a cave for a little bit? Just to get away from the noise, and the complication of the world around them? That’s why I liked it, anyway. Maybe the other kids just liked the dirt.

I don’t know why Homer was interested in the hole, but I do know I came outside one day in late October to find he and his posse—about five of them, counting Homer—yelling at the kids that usually dug on Thursdays. No one else seemed to be noticing it, and at that point I just assumed it was going to be a bad scene all around until he was done with whatever he was doing to them.

Logically, I could have stayed out of it. I could have remembered the stinging my hand still did when I put it on a table just a little too hard, and how my nose still didn’t feel right on humid days. I could have remembered the feeling of fighting to breathe as I recovered from fighting him under the tree, that hitch to my lungs that didn’t go away for a solid month. Emotionally, though, its very hard to watch several _p_ _eople_ pushing around kids half their size without feeling like you should stop it, let alone _literal monsters_.

Its very easy, once you find peace with the kind of person you are inside, to predict just how quickly you’re going to get into a fight. How much is needed to trip that switch that makes your heart race, and your mind shut down anything higher up than survival. It even becomes easy to plan ahead, before that switch, especially if you’ve fought someone before and are thinking about doing it again. It becomes a _habit_ , and it stays with you. It’s a hard one to break, that and planning on just how you’re going to make someone hurt if you have to. At the time, it was not a habit I intended on breaking—it was too valuable, and too tied to me still breathing at the end of the day. It helped, in a weird way, knowing exactly how someone like me would come at me. It helped me stay calm, thinking I knew what was coming, and at the time very little else kept me from losing my nerve over things like just _going outside_. Like the practicality of the instinct made it a positive one.

Homer’s group was mostly on the slope of the hill, with two holding a kid between them, two more inspecting the hole from inside, and Homer slapping one of the other kids around. I don’t remember what was being said, but I know they were asking questions. The kids were crying, and I was too busy barreling toward the guy with the weakest footing to listen for what it was they were saying.

Sawdust, like I said before, is wonderful at absorbing blows. It is not, I assure you, terribly great at defying gravity.

I remember that I gagged from the smell after we went tumbling down over the two in the hole, and seeing the kid he’d been holding making a break for it. The one Homer had been interrogating fled in the following confusion of the hole collapsing around us. I remember feeling content that, whatever then happened, the other kids got away fine. Well, maybe not _fine_ , but back then my definition of fine involved having a pulse and still drawing breath. It gets fuzzy from there for a bit, I think because they kicked me in the back of the head a few times before I got out of the hole and then Homer decked me across the face. This time, though, this time I knew that punching and kicking probably wouldn’t do anything.

I would like to just say that they taste worse than they smell.

It wasn’t my best or brightest idea, but it sure did a number on them until they dislocated my jaw. That's when I learned they don’t have bones. I tore one’s hand off after getting my teeth into it, all that was left after the sawdust started falling was wire. I also learned that wire somehow hurts worse than sawdust, if they smack you with it hard enough. I still have a scar across my chin from it. I lost the plot a bit after that, and woke up in the nurses office because I started gagging on my own blood. She’d opted to just put me on one of the sickbeds, on my back, until my parents could come pick me up. The kids I helped couldn’t look me in the eye for the next four years, but they lived and that was fine. I still have a crick in my neck from it, but a win is a win.

Homer was, I assume, not pleased. He was also absent for the rest of the year, so I’m not entirely sure. I like to think wherever he was getting the skins told him he couldn’t have another until he took better care of himself. I know, now, that that’s not quite what happened, but at the time I was content with him being gone. I was, however, also told I couldn’t dig with the other kids anymore. Some muttered excuse about how it was my fault they’d lost all their progress, and how I upset the others by being there. I could have fought them on it—verbally, anyway—it was a _hole_ and it wasn’t like anyone owned it. But I was not there to make decent people feel uncomfortable, so it was a sacrifice I made. Still kept an eye out for them, though. Never did find out why he was so intent on the diggers, but I don’t suppose it’s relevant.

The next and last time I encountered Homer was in my sophomore year in high school. I was fifteen and a lot calmer about pretty much everything that wasn’t a strange door, or shadow creature. I hadn’t needed to get into it with any other notchildren beyond when they would occasionally push me into traffic, and was quite content to just watch what they were doing at any given time. Homer had upgraded to an even more imposing casing, and seemed content to watch me back. Somehow him doing nothing unnerved me more than anything else. He also seemed to have more teeth each time I saw him, but that could be retrospect coloring how I see the memories.

I would like to preemptively apologize for the state of the rest of this account, because to be quite honest—my worst nightmares are of that night. At time of writing I have not slept in about a week, and I also do not foresee that getting any better. I will do my best, but it was a fucking _shitshow_ , and I might not be able to handle editing my commentary. That’s the best I can say it before I get into what happened.

You see, the last encounter I had with Homer aside of passing him in the hallway or cafeteria, was shortly after a choir concert. I don’t know when they’re usually held in England, but here they generally take place at five in the evening, and run about two to three hours. This one had been planned by one of the graduating seniors, and had about twelve different songs and a medley of all twelve toward the end. It lasted five hours. It was a wonderful show, even though in the end I carried the bass/alto section for most of it. This is probably why I couldn’t scream, later.

After the show, one of the seniors was planning on driving people home who’s parents hadn’t wanted to stay past the intermission. My parents hadn’t wanted to keep my nine year old brother up too late—and, really, I don’t think they cared much for my music—so they’d left and trusted me to find my way home somehow. I suppose it’s lucky I knew about the senior giving rides _before_ I realized they hadn’t come back for part two. It probably would have made the night at least a little bit worse, otherwise. The way it was going to work, was the senior—Simone Hartnell, I think was her name—was going to take the kids living in town home first, then swing back and pick the rest of us up. There were only about a dozen kids left between the stage crew, and the choir, and most of us lived in the same direction. Logistically, it would only take about an hour between trips and no one minded waiting. If they did, they didn’t say anything.

I remember standing in the outer foyer of the high school—the staff kicked us out of the actual school once the stage was cleaned up—with the other kids, and slowly realizing I was being watched. Initially, I thought it was just the shadow, taking a new and exciting stab at group spooking. Or, perhaps it had decided to maximize the terror it got out of me by targeting me around others. I’d actually only started looking around on the off chance that it was lurking somewhere I couldn’t see—I could feel being observed, but not the shadow itself and that bothered me—trying to catch sight of it before it could scope out a new victim that didn’t look at it so much. That’s probably the only reason I saw him at the edge of the foyer, smoking and sizing up the crowd of us.

Homer Tanner noticed me looking at him, eyes pausing their sweep of the crowd, and _smiled_. He smiled with far too many teeth at the edge of the light and those dead eyes shone almost yellow. They’d gotten better at making the eyes since the last time. The light played through the irises just the right way to make it look like there was something inside there beyond wire, sawdust, and evil. No one else seemed to be unsettled by his presence, and several people even called out to him and went to chat. A few called him by name, and introduced him to the ones who had apparently never crossed paths with him before. Some even stood close enough that I was _sure_ , he could have reached out and obliterated them.

I was given strange looks by the others, when I told them not to get near him. He just seemed to grin wider and wider, as I almost begged them to stay away. I told them—not that he wasn’t human because they’d never believe that—but that he was dangerous. A violent creep. I used every single vaguely true thing I could, to convince them to not walk into a tigers den. They all ignored me, or said I was just bitter because I didn’t have any friends. Homer had just laughed and said I was just so funny, making him seem like a real badass in front of his peers. They all seemed to assume we were friends, then, and all of this was just me playing a joke. A strange one, but a joke and I assume they thought my expression was from it not landing well. I’d often been told no one liked my sense of humor, and they all knew my old reputation, so it didn’t seem to surprise anyone that I’d think violence was _funny_. I remember being offended. I don’t know by what, specifically. It could have been the fact they thought I considered violence to be joke, or that they said I was bitter. Maybe it was just being laughed at at all.

I don’t think I was offended about being called a liar—lying was, after all, just another word for talking around a situation that would better be alluded to rather than discussed directly. There were plenty of reasons to lie, some even good, but this was not a situation where that would solve anything. The _problem_ was that truth wouldn’t have helped much either.

I remember feeling afraid, as he kept chatting away with the others—more and more people gathering over by him. Looking back, I assume I had known, somehow, what was going to happen. That I had known, inferred from how my life had gone up to that point, the way this was going to go. That I had _known_ and didn’t do enough to stop it, before it happened. I know, writing this, that I truthfully did not. I did not know, and I know now that was what frightened me. Now, it just hurts.

I had never seen them hunt before, you see. I had always known, but didn’t want to acknowledge for too long, the very basic truth of it. That, for there to be things wearing the skin of children, there had to be children for that skin to come from. Someone had to die for each of their costume changes, and it was probably very painful. I could be wrong, of course. Maybe they steal from corpses long past caring for pain, or maybe they shrink adult corpse skin to fit. I don’t know about the mechanics and I know that _wanting_ to know is morbid curiosity at its finest. Like _knowing_ will change the fact that for every single skin I ruined, they had to go get another one. Logically, I’d known that. A glove cannot exist without materials to make it, and didn’t just appear. Whatever wearing it might not even be involved in the creation of it, but it sure did wear it and require another when the current one wasn’t able to be used anymore. I don’t like thinking of it as hunting. I don’t like the idea that Homer was sizing everyone up—people I had been in school with my _whole life_ , even if they hated and _feared_ me—and thinking on who would make the best suit. I don’t like the idea that he considered my skin in that way, but that is a vastly secondary concern.

But just because I don’t like it, and just because it wakes me screaming almost as much as anything else, does not mean that’s not what happened. Or, perhaps, the term hunting just isn’t _correct_.

There was, after all, no chase or overt menace as he lulled everyone else into a false sense of security. No bloodlust. It was calm, easy, practiced. Almost effortless. Like calling animals to the trailer before taking them to the slaughter house, looking over them as they lined up in the chute and suspected _nothing_. I am, perhaps, stalling here to avoid continuing both the analogy or the statement, but I promised I would put it down.

After a good half hour of chatting, my veins chilling more with every passing moment, he asked the group if they’d like to come to a party he and some friends were having. It was at the abandoned butchers shop, down past the flour mill where there was plenty of space and no one around to hear the music. He looked at me as he said it, and I think the others thought that meant I’d known about this party. I don’t know what my face was doing, then, but I know enough people seemed to interpret it as excited that a few of the people started focusing more on it. While they asked if there would be couches and snacks, rides home—someone offered to call Simone and say they had other arrangements if there was a plan—I was trying to remember how to breathe.

In retrospect, I know it was a flash of understanding and terror that kept me mute at the suggestion. I also know it was an overwhelming rush of static filled paranoia, white hot through my chest over the cold panic, that made it hard to do anything else at all.

You see, I was aware of exactly the place he’d mentioned. I knew exactly how to get there, down to the exact way to navigate the road out there to avoid the worst of the potholes. I even knew the building, and which of the front steps had chips missing, and the feeling of the iron pipes the owner had decided would pass for railings when it was first built. I knew it very well indeed. I knew that place, almost as well as my own home, because for the first twelve years of my life, it might as well have been.

My family used to own that shop, until it was too expensive to keep both the family fed and the shop running. I think my father still considers it a betrayal that he had to choose us over the place, but that doesn’t effect my memories of it. I was raised half surrounded by meat processing, and the other half running around the trailer park unattended. By nine, I had mastered the art of doing my homework in the corner of the meat cutting room without getting blood on it. My teachers always hated when I turned in messy homework. The reception area was amazingly narrow, and me using the counter for homework would have taken up valuable display space, but the table by the bone saw was always free. I had played in the walk in freezer, after the deliveries had been shipped out, splashing in the puddles of melted frost. I helped push slabs of meat along the hook tracks when I was done with my homework, gloves on and dripping blood soaking into my tennis shoes. I’d sat in the loading bay, drinking soda with the workers and talking about television, while they waited for dad’s newest delivery of spices and salt pack to come in. I knew that place. I also knew—and to this day _know—_ that there is not a single place in that building aside the parking lot and loading bay that has room for more than six people at a time.

Well, that’s not strictly true. There was plenty of room in the freezer and the smoker, if what was in there wasn’t picky about how close it got. Or what was putting things inside wasn’t, anyway.

I focused on the place, I remember, mostly because I was terrified that he’d known I was connected to it. I didn’t even consider that he was probably just taunting me, seeing me trying to help those people and then dangling that he was taking them to a _butcher shop._ A twist of the knife to rub it in that I couldn’t help. I don’t think I realized there was a possibility he hadn’t known. It just made sense to me that he’d have known and was going to use the place against me. I should have realized that it wasn’t about me, but it’s always hard to realize when you’re in it and later, when you’re busy blaming yourself for everything.

It was like watching a train wreck, seeing everyone agree to wait while he went to get his van. I remember, distinctly, one of the lighting crew calling Simone and saying they found another ride and she could just go home. I wanted to argue, to say I’d still like a ride home, but I couldn’t make myself speak. I would like to say it was because of something Homer was doing to me, some dark power that made me go with what was happening. I know that is not the case, and I ask whoever reads this in the future, to not judge me too harshly for so many things, but mostly for this.

I knew, dimly, that I wasn’t going to let them all go with Homer without doing something about it. Likewise, it felt like all the cold terror, static and jabbing needles, settled into my stomach as his van pulled up to the curb. I knew I was going to get in that van with a dozen other people, and I knew that not everyone was going to get home that night. I also knew it was not a question of everyone.

It was, I realized as I watched people start climbing in the back, a question of how many. It was a question of how many I could save before I couldn’t do it anymore. How many people sitting in this ratty blue van, with darkened windows and bench seats on the sides, would still be breathing in the morning. The answer, as always, would be _a_ _s many as I could_ _save_. I suppose it sounds better than counting how many I couldn’t save, anyway. Not that I can remember.

I saw Homer in the side mirror as I climbed in last. He seemed surprised, and mildly confused. It was a small victory, that flash of confusion, before I pulled the door closed on our hearse. Dark was a good term for the interior of the van. The seats, as I said, were along the sides like some sort of prisoner escort vehicle. There weren’t any seat belts, which Homer waved away as just not having come in the mail yet. Likewise, there was no upholstery or carpeting. There were, however, what I assumed at the time to be grab bars running down either side of the roof. I know now that’s not what they—or the coils of rope under the seats—were for. There was also a fine wire grate between the back—where we sat, most chatting away—and where Homer drove. If he glanced back at any time in the drive, I didn’t notice it. I was too busy trying to make my brain remember how to plan a fight.

I hadn’t fought in years at that point, not anything stronger than a group of jocks who didn’t take someone’s no for an answer, anyway. Not without being able to steal a weapon off of one, because they’d thought it would help and not known how to keep a hold on said weapon. At that point it was pure defense if I had to scrounge up the instinct and if it didn’t put me out of commission for a while, the following revulsion usually did. Even when I scraped by, it still ended up _hurting_.

Everything hurts when this is the life you’re trying to move through. Injuries compound, after a while. They calcify and warp, and make things difficult. Hands fill with scar tissue, joints lock and catch on themselves. The limber you used to be, does not carry after enough things tear and don’t heal right. They make the strongest you can be a whole lot _weaker_ , no matter what you need yourself to do. Not to mention, I was _tired_. I’d just been on my feet for five hours and change. My sides hurt from effort of breathing and singing in the concert, _and_ helping move the risers afterward. It wasn’t ideal, but if it came down to it—adrenaline would cover a lot. I figured I could ignore the pain of whatever happened until it wore off, and hopefully by that time it’d be over. I had a pocket knife that I kept on me for self defense, and I knew at the very least I could ruin more casings and maybe buy some time for people to run. I didn’t know if I had the strength to bend their internal wires, because I’d never had an occasion to try that I could remember, and even if I did have the strength, it would take time. If there was more than one coming on at a time, it would be a problem. That said, I didn’t need to make it final, and I didn’t even need to make it devastating. Hell, I didn’t even need to live to see the other side of what happened. I just needed whatever I was going to do, to be _distracting_.

There’s an old saying about how plans never survive implementation, or how every battle plan works until it comes up against the enemy. My dad used to say it a lot, whenever I’d done something wrong and he had to change his plans to handle it. Sometimes, he’d even say it when _he_ screwed up, but that was rare. The point of the saying is that planning is a very good thing, but real life very rarely goes according to plan, but you should be able to adapt to it. I assume that, in retrospect, I should have planned that an inhuman monster would not have had similar lines of logic as I had.

You see, when I had planned to make a fuss, I had assumed that Homer would have brought us around to the front of the building and let us out there, to be funneled in unsuspecting. Use the narrow entrance to make it harder for people to turn and run. Then, once everyone was working past the counter, another notchild would close the door and trap us inside.

This did not happen.

Instead, he backed up to the loading dock, and opened the doors. The first person he saw, of course, was me looking down at him. He grinned, and thanked me for coming along. I was getting tired of that smile. I got out and watched the others do so too, some asking where everyone else was. He assured everyone that his friends were just inside, and didn’t want to keep doors open in case anyone happened to drive by and hear the music. We entered through the loading bay door, and I realized several things at once as the others chatted with him.

The first thing was the smell. It wasn’t the usual overwhelming tobacco and chemicals, though those were both certainly present. The main smell was blood—and it was so thick I almost gagged on it. Not animal blood, either. That almost always had a sharp, almost chilled smell to it, even when it was fresh after a specialty order. Hit the nose differently is the best way to describe it; always sunk in around the nostrils and sat there until you got some fresh air. I don’t know why, probably a composition thing that I don’t terribly want to dwell on. Human blood, though, was always pennies. Copper, with sweat and dirt mixed in, if it was from someone else. It settles deep in your nose, kicks in all those deep impulses to either help someone, run away, or hurt something. Takes hours to go away, that smell. Clings to you, almost as much as smoke does. There, even in the loading bay—which I knew was at least a door from anywhere blood _should_ be—it felt like I was wading in it. There was fresh blood, of course, but that wasn’t what was hitting my gag reflex. It was the old blood, the smell of blood that had caked over surfaces, dried and was moistened again part way through decay, with new and old mixing. Rust, but a thousand times worse. I cannot describe the feeling of the _smell_ crawling down my nose and into my mouth, coating my tongue and making me _taste it_.

It was dark, and the smell made it harder to focus, but from what I could see—it looked almost like how it always did after someone decided to dump their deer carcasses there before actually doing anything past gutting them. A wide, rectangular room with blood hiding most of the concrete. There was no drain, and I assume Homer had never bothered to hose the place down after they used it. In the dark, the stains and caked blood looked more like mold than anything, and I honestly couldn’t tell you if there was any or not. The floor wasn’t sticky, so it was probably all dried, not that that was particularly comforting. As we moved through the bay, my eyes were watering, but not enough that I couldn’t see the others furthest from Homer getting uneasy. I remember seeing the guy next to me, I don’t know his name, gagging quietly and looking around. I think he’d finally begun to feel afraid as he processed our surroundings. Dark, the blood flaking up under everyone’s feet, Homer leading us all further in without approaching the only door out of the room. I remember that kid looking at me, and in the dark, having an expression of terrible understanding. We’d stopped walking in the back of the group. I had done so because I hoped he’d be some help in what was going to come, whatever that might have been. I don’t know why he stopped. I didn’t even bother thinking about if it was a change in his proximity to Homer that let him be afraid at the time, I was just wondering how it could possibly get worse. Then, casual as breathing, Homer had reached up and pressed a button on the wall.

With a whine of rusted chains, the loading bay door slammed shut behind us and the last bit of light we’d had was gone.

I remember hearing two things in the darkness. Screaming, which didn’t surprise me, and the sound of a knife being sharpened in the next room over. I don’t know if the notchildren can see in the dark, or whatever they are has no need for actual sight, but I damn sure knew when something that wanted me dead was looking at me. It gets blurry, here, because everyone was panicking and I had a choice to make. I could go toward the door, deeper into the shop, and hopefully there’d be light in there that let the others see how to escape. I could find Homer in the dark, hope I didn’t make a mistake or accidentally stab someone while cutting him up enough that he wouldn’t be a problem, and then once _he_ fled we’d be able to get out that way. Or, the option I chose, which was turning around and breaking for the bay door. I remember the feeling of menace getting closer, and honestly if it had been the shadow I would probably have been able to handle that. Being hunted, and being chased by things that wanted me dead were one thing—but that feeling from something that wanted my skin? To use me in some way? Not something I could have ignored. I remember frantically searching in the dark for the chains that raised and lowered the door, and once my fingers found the oily, rusted metal, I hauled on them as hard as I could. I remember the sheer, almost dizzying rush I felt when the first shaft of moonlight showed through under the door. I got it up about a foot and a half before a rope was put around my neck and I was yanked back, hard. I collided with whatever was choking me, and the shift in pressure let me get a hand between my neck and the rope. Not long or loose enough to escape from, but enough for it not to crush my windpipe. I remember struggling and the sound of a door opening, a blinding light pouring in from deeper into the shop. As my captor hauled me toward the door, I could see some of the people were laying on the ground, unmoving. Others were fighting against their own death sentence, either literally or by running. I remember, as I was pushed toward the door, hearing a few hauling the bay door further open, and scrambling outside. I recall thinking, in what I had assumed to be a lead up to my final moments, that a few would get away. But a few was not _enough_.

While they herded me toward the door, I could see inside. What looked like a faceless man in an apron stood over a row of metal tables, knife in one hand and a pair of bone shears in the other. I remember thinking, when it turned its head to look at me through the door, that it seemed _annoyed_. Like I was, personally, making this whole ordeal take too long, and it had things to do that my continued existence kept it from doing. As if in response, I was pushed forward even harder, a knee to the back of my leg that made me gasp through the pressure already on my throat. I didn’t let them get me through the door easily, though.

You don’t need to be experienced in fighting monsters to be very good at not letting things stronger than you force you somewhere you didn’t want to go. You _do_ need to have just little enough sense to apply it when you _are_ facing monsters, though, I suppose. I braced a foot on one side of the door frame, and planted my other foot as firmly as I possibly could to the floor while being herded. For all the world, it probably looked like I thought one braced leg would stop this forward march. The notchild holding me took the bait, trying to force me forward by kicking out toward the leg on the floor, and in the process pushed my braced leg into a bend.

Once more, sawdust is not adept at defying physics, while I am extremely good at obeying it.

Pushing hard against the door frame, I launched backward and when we both hit the floor, I got free. I had another choice, then,. I could have tried grabbing the people who’d collapsed in fear, and running. Or just running and saving my own skin. I chose, instead, to run into the other room and directly at the notperson with a knife. It was narrow in that room, and even if more came in after me, it would be a limited number.

I wish I could say it was from some calculated idea that I could wrestle the knife away and do my damage with it better than dragging out a pocket knife. That it would have taken less time, and been easier. I wish I could say that, as I barreled into it shoulder first, I did not cry out in pain from colliding with solid wood. Or that the scar I now have across my left upper arm is from the ensuing heroics and not, in reality, from a stab wound that sent me reeling back from where the creature had landed hard against a counter, into a table that promptly fell over. I wish I could say that I recovered flawlessly, easily, and then bravely fought off the monsters. I wish I could say I responded like a hero.

But the things I would _like_ to say would not be the truth.

The truth is, that the notperson had sunk the bone shears into my arm as I hit it, and I had recoiled in an act of unthinking—cowardly—self preservation. That I hit a table while reeling, and that table hit another, and the thing on top of the first table fell toward me. That my knees partially gave out on the impact, and the weight first impacted my head. Then took me fully to the floor under a mass of limbs and tissue, that I was in too much shock to recover from as quickly as I’d have liked. The truth is, that I realized I was pinned under a flayed open _corpse_ and I couldn’t even scream. I opened my mouth as I scrambled under the body, _and I could not scream_. Not from pain, not from horror at the situation, or even terror at the realization the notperson was coming toward me with it’s knife raised. All I could do was stare in horror, fingers slipping on damp corpse-flesh as I tried to escape, and realizing I was going to die there. I was going to die there and no one would know, aside the few who got away. That they certainly cared more about the others that were now dead, than me. Homer, I thought with a sense of grim numbness, was going to finally get me to share.

This is not the twist reveal of a story where I’ve been a monster all this time. This is not the part of the story where I say I acted in a rush of adrenaline and burned the place down with all the monsters inside it, like some action movie. This is the part where I admit that I’m probably a monster of a completely different kind, while being totally and completely—perhaps dangerously—human.

Do you know how much force a body can absorb if there’s no response of tensed muscle? When it’s just cold, dead, flesh? Fat kept on meat and bone, through sheer lack of time to slough off itself? It turns out, _enough_.

I’m not proud of using that poor person like that. They didn’t ask for that death, and then afterward to be treated like a glorified shield made of meat. I’m not proud that, after a barrage of slashes and jabs, I was relieved to feel the knife stick into their spine, stuck in the cartilage of the discs there. Not long, not forever, but long _enough_. Long enough for me to have regained enough strength through adrenaline, and space—created when the corpse was pulled forward with the knife—that I could get my feet under me. So I could lunge forward, with all the strength of the feral animal I was and am, slamming the body into the notperson. I remember the sound it made, ribs cracking as I ran it forward, and rammed the notperson backward into the wall. I remember the sound of wood splintering. I remember grabbing, _pulling_ , throwing—just a blur of motions I knew were violent and directed by some primal part of me that wanted only to destroy. I think there was shouting from another room, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to hurt it as much as I could before it got back up, or something else came for me. I wanted it to suffer, and if I couldn’t do that with my bare hands I didn’t know how else to. I wanted, if this _thing_ could not die, I wanted to make it wish it had the mercy as an option.

The next clear thing I remember was standing back inside the loading bay, and the lights were on. There was so much blood, and so much sawdust. I can’t remember how at least one of those things got there, but I did know why I was there. The moment is crystal clear, always: I am hacking at Homer, mouth curled into a snarl, with his hands around my throat. My nose and throat felt thick, every ounce of wet inside was coated with sawdust. I couldn’t feel my left arm, and my grip on the knife I was using was slick with something. It might have been rot from the corpse, chemicals to avoid that sort of thing, or it could have been my own blood. I wasn’t focused on my hand, I was focused on plunging the blade into his chest again and again until as much sawdust came out as I could get. The wire in his hands—already turning into morbid gloves more than appendages—was enough to press with, but it didn’t have the even pressure you need to kill someone through strangulation. It was cold, and the places his fingers had been crimped off at angles dug into me sharply. I became dimly aware, as my vision started to swim, that he wasn’t trying to strangle me. He was trying _to break me_ and he was _failing_. Knowing what I do now, it was because wire is not terribly strong in single strands, or even two or three—his hands were bending out of shape without the sawdust, as I struggled and he kept pressing. Had I known, then, that the best he could do at that point was claw my throat out, I think that I would have laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it seems so glaringly obvious in hindsight.

At the time, though, all I knew was that he was cutting me more than anything else. I could handle being cut. I could have handled a lot of things then. What I couldn’t handle, was that he still looked alive. I remember grabbing onto the mesh construction that made up the scaffolding of his skull, and _twisting_. I remember moving forward and ignoring how his fingers went deeper into my neck as I took him to the wall and pressed. I pressed, and warped him until he fit, writhing, in my hand. I put his mangled form on the ground, and I put all my weight onto it. I folded him over and over, until he was thin and flat, and moved no more. Then, when I was finally starting to get too dizzy to do much, I shoved him down the grate of the shop floor drain.

I remember flashes from there to when I officially woke up in the hospital. I think I passed out in the shop area, where the corpses were. I remember smelling rot from the drain, as I lay with my cheek on the tile, staring at the body I’d misused as it still lay on the floor.

I remember coming to in my hospital bed, hooked up to all manner of IV’s and my heart monitor going a bit wild. The doctor told me I’d been fighting off a terrible infection for a few weeks, at that point. The police that had been waiting to talk to me seemed to think the group I was with went wandering around, looking for somewhere to cause trouble, and stumbled into a murder den. I didn’t correct them. They asked if i got a good look at at who had done this, and if I left any easily identifiable marks on the murderer before they fled. I told them it was all a blur, and it wasn't totally a lie. 

They had asked if I’d gotten a good look at the bodies, and when I said no they nodded and said it was good I hadn’t.

They told me, after the coroner was done with everything, that it was the work of a serial killer, and I had gotten very lucky to have had a chance to fight back. Every victim, you see, had been strangled to death from behind. There were no defensive injuries on the people found in the butcher shop. Every single one of the victims had been done using a thick cotton rope, from behind. They'd gone on to explain that the person who did it must have been very strong, and once more asked if I remembered anything. I told them no again. 

I really wish they hadn't told me about most of it.

From what I’ve been able to learn, strangulation leaves skin intact, and thick rope with a wide weave means less chance of cutting the skin from pressure. Bruising, I assume, could have been dealt with when they drained the blood from the victims. Cuts to the already thin skin of teens and children were probably something they wanted to avoid making more of than necessary. I’m sure it’s in a police report, and if not it’s probably in at least the records of the local paper. I don’t know how many got out of there, in total. I don't know their names. I always kind of hoped it was more than didn’t, but I’m not sure that’s what happened. I’ve never been able to make myself look into it and know.

My parents visited me on the fifth day I was awake. Funnily enough, they were mad about how much the hospital stay was going to cost. Mad that I hadn’t actually gone home when I said I was going to, and decided to get mixed up in… whatever that was.

I tried to tell them, you know. Tried explaining, over and over, about Homer and the notchildren, and why dad’s chain-smoking made me nervous aside of the asthma. You know what they told me, after all that? After they came to visit and I was in tears because I could have sworn I saw someone with no face when I looked out the window? That I was already getting enough attention, and I should stop lying to get more. I don’t tell them about the notpeople anymore.

I’ve seen more and more of the wooden ones around, lately. I don’t know if more are being made, or they’re coming from somewhere else. I think they know I know them for what they are, when no one else does. I think they’re watching me, or at the very least something is.

Thankfully, they seem centered around town—so I should be safe as far out as I am. The furthest I’ve seen one range is a mile. I hope it stays that way.

* * *

Gertrude finished reading the statement with a hum, picking up Michael’s follow up report from the week before and setting it beside the statement. It was worrying to hear that the circus had branched out into America, and more worrying that they seemed to be looking for something. She supposed it could have been an extension of their hunt for the ancient skin on the off chance they thought she’d hidden it there, but surely that didn’t necessitate a whole operation in the area. Even if it did, the comment about the creatures interest in the children digging sat oddly with her. She could Know why, but she preferred to make the connections herself.

It’s possible that May had been in contact with a young avatar of the Buried, or someone the Buried had been courting, and just happened to stumble into another scuffle between powers. The question, really, was _why_ the circus would bother. The Buried hardly interfered with anything as far as she knew, much less the Stranger. If anything, they complimented one another more than not—one could feel quite trapped and helpless, when faced with something just outside the known. She supposed there could be something happening she didn’t know about, but you can’t speculate on what you don’t know. It could be to do with the next go at the Unknowing, but the Buried was never an active power. She tapped idly at the pile of papers, trying to put together a through-line.

Even if she couldn’t piece together what the circus was doing in Washington, she supposed looking further into May’s case could be enlightening. Not that someone brushing up against multiple powers was terribly beyond the realm of possibility, but three ongoing interactions was a bit surprising, to say the least. Not to mention the glaring lack of any mention of spiders, in either the statement she’d just read, or the pages of the Distortion statement Eric had put together so far. It all felt terribly convenient in light of that detail, how the pieces weren’t putting themselves together. Or, she thought blandly, at least how several completed pages had ended up scrambled when Eric left them on his desk overnight.

If it was the Web’s doing, it was worth figuring out what it got out of drawing her attention to America. Or, she supposed, from warning May about the Distortion. It either intended to aid them, or to use them, and she wasn’t quite sure which would be more concerning. She couldn’t come up with a reason for it to care, not from the information they’d been able to gather, but it was also harder to get that sort of information from across an ocean. What they _had_ managed to get, was far less enlightening than conversations with May themselves.

As expected, the Usher Foundation had, indeed, logged their call—a whole fifteen minutes of May trying to explain about people without faces, before the interviewer recommended a psychiatrist and hung up. The second call they had made, leading to the referral to the institute, had been a five minute ordeal where their side of the call was reportedly nearly unintelligible. The recording they’d sent over sounded normal enough, to her, aside of a strange pulsing background noise to May’s side of the conversation that peaked when they mentioned a door. The sound nearly drowned out the interviewer’s side as they passed along the number, and cut out abruptly once May had repeated it back to them. The report had been labeled in their systems as false and slotted away. The letter attached to the transcripts and tape—from the foundation’s head of records—was mostly a baffled interest in why Gertrude cared about what was obviously someone who’d watched too many horror movies.

Gertrude decided against telling them how to do their jobs, as doing hers took more than enough of her time as it was. Like she was going to have to do now. Specifically, the part of her job that allowed for some delegation of tasks. She set the papers in order on her desk, slipped them all into May’s file, and went to get Eric.

She found him right where he’d been three hours ago, piecing together more pages while Sarah and Michael discussed the best way to get more information on a statement that Gertrude was reasonably sure was nothing. Emma, for her part, appeared deeply focused on whatever she was typing up. They all said their greetings, aside of Eric, when they noticed she’d come in.

“Did you need something, Ms. Robinson?”

“Nothing pressing, Michael, thank you.” She looked to Eric, who was still slowly sliding papers together. “I would like if you could join me in my office, Eric. Presently, if you would.”

She was back inside before he had a chance to say he wouldn’t. He considered, briefly, not going. He also considered the fact that, if he didn’t, Michael would stress at him about it, and Sarah would make some joke about him avoiding the principals office. Even now, he could see her looking at him with raised eyebrows over her cup of coffee, like she’d just seen him get sent to the corner. That was probably unfair; she just liked prodding at the resident old man, but it still got old. Like him, he supposed. With a grumble, he placed a book over the progress he’d made to keep it in place, and trudged into the office.

He pulled the door closed behind him perhaps just a touch harder than was strictly necessary, but if Gertrude minded, she didn’t show it. She gestured for him to sit across from her, and he did with a grimace. The chairs in her office were always too stiff for him—he supposed that was the point, she didn’t terribly like having anyone in with her for long periods, and used them mostly as places to put statements when she was going through them. He looked at her expectantly, if only because he honestly had no idea what she could need him there for. She never listened to him about the filing, and it’s not like he offered much else, as contrary as he was. She slid a file toward him, and it wasn’t hard to recognize—Michael’d had it out on his desk almost as much as she did.

“How would you feel about a little field work, Eric?”

“I don’t like field work.” His tone was flatter than the seat of the chair he was in, and far less comfortable. “Is that the point, here?”

“No, Eric.” Her expression remained impassive. “The point is that I’ve just read their other statement and it isn’t looking terribly promising for them. You were there when Michael called, yes?”

It was phrased as a question, but it wasn’t. He nodded.

“Then you know they’ve been handling a very bad case of the Stranger for quite some time.” She flipped open the file and gestured for him to read the alligator clipped statement that now rested on top of the other documents. “It is, apparently, worse than the phone call made it sound.”

“I don’t see how it could be.”

“Read it, then tell me that.”

They sat in stony silence while he read through it. He had to appreciate that they had at least tried to stick to a format, and it was pretty detailed for being self directed. The actual content of the statement, however, did nothing but make him deeply uncomfortable. When he was done, he quietly placed the statement back on the pile of papers.

“Alright, so it’s worse.” He sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. “What fieldwork do you want me to do? Poke around a three year old crime scene? Interrogate the kid?”

“Interrogate isn’t the word I’d hoped for, no.” She, too, leaned back, though it was more to study him than anything. He didn’t like it when she did that; it made him feel much too seen. “I want you to investigate the area. If so many entities are involved with one person, either the person is special…”

“...Or the place is.”

“Precisely. I want you to compile a list of odd occurrences in Washington, and see if you can find anything further out of the ordinary than normal.” A pause as she considered something, eyes taking on that look she got when weighing how important something was to what she was doing. “I also want you to take Michael with you.”

At this, he sat bolt upright.

“What? Why? I’m not saying he’d be bad for it—he’s more adept in the field than I am—but you know damn well he’s never run into anything actually dangerous!” He paused, a look of deep displeasure and understanding coming over him. “You think whoever goes over there isn’t going to come back.”

“Hardly.” She saw his eyes darken, and continued. “I think if Michael hears you’re going to investigate the May case, he’ll want to go with you. He’s become… rather attached to it.”

“And you think he couldn’t handle whatever he’d find on his own?”

“Its more a matter of you having the experience and knowledge that he _lacks_ , while he has the enthusiasm to keep you on task instead of wandering off until you die in a ditch.”

He quirked an eyebrow.

“You think I wouldn’t look into it regardless? I know you’re cold, Gertrude, but it’s still a kid in that file.” He paused, mouth ticking up a bit at the corner in sudden understanding. “Unless you think I’d get too invested in more than one of the things we’re investigating, and I’m actually there to keep _him_ on task for you.”

“Good, you’ve managed to not go senile on me yet.” If he didn’t know her better, he’d almost think there was fondness there. Almost. The look of amusement was real, though. “I want you to go to May’s residence last.”

“Not in a hurry to solve the mystery?”

“Concerned about another one, more like.”

“Are you going to share what that might be, or am I going to have to guess?” He deeply didn’t like being left out of loops. One of the many things that lead to him being stuck here, he assumed. “Or will you hand us a note as we leave, telling us to look out for Bigfoot?”

The calculated look was back, and he very much didn’t like what that could mean.

“I want you to get into contact with the US geological survey, and ask them _politely_ for any seismic data they could possibly release to the Institute. I’ll handle anything after initial contact—i just want you to find out how hard it’ll be to get from them.”

He stared at her for a long moment before something clicked.

“You think the Buried’s up to something.”

“The circus seems to, at any rate. Even if it’s not something like a ritual--”

“You still want to hold all the cards you can.”

“Precisely.” She sat forward and flipped the file closed before gesturing toward the door. “Now, I’m giving you and Michael two weeks to research and plan. If I come across anything else out of the ordinary I’d like you to look into, I’ll tell you. That will be all.”

He took the file—because he wasn’t going to take Michael in _totally_ unprepared—and pondered not rolling his eyes, for about half a second, as he left. At the very least, he figured he could make the Institute foot the bill for staying in a nice hotel. Worst comes to worst, she didn’t say they had to _do_ anything about the weird things they looked into. Best case scenario, he got to laze around sight seeing with a coworker for a few weeks.

“So, how long are you grounded?” Sarah teased after he’d shut the door behind him and headed to his desk. She was almost out of her chair as she leaned to get a look at the file he was carrying. “Or is it just more homework?”

“Neither.” He sunk into his office chair and tossed the file onto Michael’s ever growing heap of notes and reminders to himself. If his coworker hadn’t recognized it, he probably would have jumped higher. As it was, Michael just silently flipped it open and started into the statement that still sat on top. Eric powered up his computer and belatedly remembered to press the button on the monitor. “It’s a field trip.”

“You? On _actual_ fieldwork?” She snorted and sat back, knocking at least one notepad to the floor as she did so. She didn’t seem to care all that much. “What, did she need you to go sit somewhere and talk shit about antiques roadshow?”

“Nope.” He entered his password and wondered if googling ‘weird’ and ‘washington’ would bring up anything useful. “She’s sending Michael and I to America. Probably to get rid of us, to be honest.”

Michael paused, finger mid-page turn, and looked at him oddly.

“Why didn’t she call _me_ in, then?”

“Dunno.” He was going to google ‘weird washington’ and if anything bad came up, that was going to be on Gertrude. “I think she’s under the impression you’ll get too invested.”

“I am totally capable of being academically detached--”

“Read the statement and tell me that.” He’d hit enter without looking up, and was scrolling through the first page of results content in the knowledge they’d be spending a _lot_ of time in perfectly normal bookshops with a morbid aesthetic. And at least one cave on Mt. St. Helens. “ _Trust me._ ”

About five minutes, and Eric making 20 bookmarks later, Michael quietly put the statement back in the file, and closed it. He then grabbed one of his notepads, and slid down to sit on the floor before using a pen from his hair to start writing furiously.

“Told you.”


	4. G46: Last Calls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's some THINGS in this chapter, but we're kicking off strong.   
> CW: Misgendering, injury, shitty parents, unreality, a single important spider, and also dental trauma. and teeth in general
> 
> Let's go team, trauma time

There are very few instances where ‘panic’ and ‘instinct’ play nice with one another, and those very rarely end out well.

April felt this was unfair, in some deep part of their brain that wasn’t focusing very intently on trying not to breathe. They perhaps could have allowed themselves to do so more than they were, but the crunch of rocks moving around underneath them wasn’t quite loud enough to cover it. A few stuttered pulls through their nose, and exhaling slow through the hand clamped over their own mouth was what they could manage over the sound. It was a good thing, they decided, that when the human body was being designed, very little went into overriding a human’s desire to do something harmful to themselves. Just, as a general rule, as they tried to keep still.

They were, for reasons they could only put down to panic drawing straws out of adrenaline’s bucket of pond slime, curled up in the loft of their woodshed. In their pajamas and no shoes. Shed might have been overselling it—it was more of a lean-to made of logs, tarps, and enough chicken wire that it probably put someone’s kids through college. The level below was largely empty, holding really only the riding lawnmower and weed trimmer. Sure, there were piles of unused fencing here and there, but nothing that would take a lot of time to search. A tarp older than they were acted as walls on the top section, guarding hoses and lawn decorations, when it wasn’t just ruffling in the wind. The roof was slanted and rusting metal, that threatened to give them away if their head moved just a bit too far back. It was, for all it’s mundane appearance, currently saving their life. If the wind would cooperate long enough to not rip the tarps off, they might even paint it when their heart rate calmed down some. Something lunged below them, kicking rocks against the mower as it came to a stop. A sound of disappointment.

“April, come on now.” They gripped their face tighter. The voice was coming from below them, and about two feet to their left. They wondered, idly, why Homer couldn’t have decided to come for them when their family still raised guard dogs. Oh right, because the world hated them, specifically. Silly of them to forget that. He was chuckling as he paced back and forth. They thanked whatever passed for god for the tarp between the overhang and the ground. “I do like playing this game with you, we both know that, but come _on—_ I have things to do! I had to come all the way over from Idaho with this face! You didn’t even ask who this used to be! Now that’s just rude to both of us!”

Another crash as either he or another notperson moved something around. They heard muffled swearing and Homer chuckled.

“See, now Cindy’s going to need a new skin. All because of you!” More laughing, this time from many voices. Their stomach dropped as they counted at least ten. They could hear him pacing, and they tried not to crack their teeth keeping quiet. “I’m sure she’s not picky! We can’t take your folks, though, sadly. Adults are so much harder to overpower—well, you know we get trouble makers sometimes. Think your kid brother’s a hard case too?”

They knew it was a ploy. They _knew_ it was bait, and that reacting was going to go terribly. They _knew_ that, but they were so, so tired. They were tired and they weren’t feeling everything the right way, and the lines between exhaustion, bone deep terror, and blinding anger are so, so, _so_ , very thin. They knew, in the tiny bit of brain still running logic that this was going to be a terrible idea. That moving wasn’t going to go well, and neither would jumping down into the fray and doing anything physically possible to keep these things away. They were alone, in the middle of the day, and all they could hear was Homer taunting them from below. Their toes curled against the rough wood under them, and they bit back a hiss as splinters worked their way into at least one of them.

That tiny bit of logic still running things did not win the argument, but it did put in a very strong case for not airdropping fifteen feet onto hard objects that could have been armed. It took almost all the energy in their body to stay put, arm slowly working down from their mouth and over the grimy beams to their left. It was slow, so, so agonizingly slow—one twitch would have done them in, sending them into a frenzy of scrambling hands and running away—but sure enough, inch by dusty inch, their fingers made their way toward salvation.

You see, this being a woodshed, it contained both a subsection for wood, and the means by which to cut wood. They by no means expected to both get a hold of and use a splitting axe, but a hatchet would do just fine. Just one blade to give just one advantage before Homer or something else got the better of them.

“April, you know you can’t stay out here forever. Just because you see through us, doesn’t mean they will. We can do this a couple ways, and only a few turn out well for that little brat. Didn’t he start getting picked on? We could make that stop for you.” He sounded like he was kicking the dirt as he lit another cigarette. He also snorted as the others kept moving things around. “Nah, I didn’t think you were _that_ dumb. Believe me, you’re pretty stupid—but I will give you self preservation and creativity. The drain bit, last time we crossed paths? Fucking inspired. Took weeks to work myself out of that, then get in shape to peel someone else. If you’d been any more competent, you might have had a place somewhere. Not with us, no we like our people to know what they’re doing. Nah, but the others could use dumb muscle.”

They gently lowered themselves sideways as he talked, sliding their fingers gingerly along the handle of the hatchet. The blood pounding in their ears told them to rush, to jolt forward and lose themselves until they either lost their life or the monsters lost theirs. It was much, much harder to keep their breath from running unchecked as they willed themselves forward. More accurately it was difficult because they were willing themselves _backward_. Asthma plucking at their chest aside, it was hard to convince themselves there were sounds happening that wasn’t just their pulse in their ears. Their body was about fifty feet into the rage induced adrenaline rush, and the only thing keeping the rest of their mind from catching up was the mental image of their little brother’s face. At the very least they weren’t going to let him be alone with all the weird shit they’d tracked home.

“I think she’s just not here, man.” The voice was lighter, with a touch of rasp. It was hard to tell through the blood that welled up around the pronoun, so hard, but they tried to focus. They needed to know more than their anger. The rasp could have been an affectation, or it could have been sawdust vocal chords. They chanced a glance from the hatchet to check if the tarp was moving, and froze. The first thing that registered was the shadow of a notperson through the blue of the tarp. The second, much more emotionally conflicting thing, was the outline of an extremely large spider. “You know how fast people run. She’s probably at—shit!”

Notpeople, they observed, apparently also do not like realizing their faces are next to giant spiders. Not a great tactical bit of information, but the sound of it falling ass over teakettle was wonderful for covering their lunge over the last few inches to fully grab the hatchet before rolling to their knees.

“ _Really_ , Sam?” Homer, they mused over their pounding heart, sounded extremely annoyed. “What’s that gonna do? You don’t even have skin.”

“It surprised me, okay? Fuck, man.” It sounded like they were pushed into some of the loose fencing, and were being laughed at. A supernatural level of control kept them in position when a rock hit, and bounced off of, the tarp by one of the spider’s legs. It’s forelegs twitched, but otherwise it stayed in place.

“Hey, you—yeah hairy mclonglegs, _you_. Fuck off, this one is ours. We found them fair and square.” A pause and an extremely audible pull on his cigarette. “Unless you think you’re helping? Think you got this big plan going on, like anyone gives a shit about you. Unless there’s a big fuckin’ hole they crawled into, this is between us and them. Go eat some flies, or something. Make someone jump off a cliff, who cares.”

“Hey man, maybe don’t? We’re not here to start shit--”

“We’re here to do what I say we’re here to do, now shut the fuck up and get back up there. You two—check in the house again. We got another hour before the brat comes home from school. I’d rather we just took him back with us without a fight.” Sounds like he was stomping out a cigarette, before the click of a lighter started another. Their grip on the hatchet was almost painful. Another pull later and he groaned. “Sam, get up the _fucking_ wall.”

“No way. You wanna piss her off, that’s on you. I’m gonna go looking for any big pits the bitch could have crawled into. Anyone else feel like pissing her off, or are we gonna do our jobs?” The shed rattled with an impact, and they could only imagine it was Homer taking out his frustrations while trying to move the spider. It didn’t budge. “See? Lets just go look--”

Another sound of a scuffle before sounds of many footsteps retreating.

It was then that April realized where this left them.

They were crouched, joints already deeply displeased with the position, across from the entrance to the overhang. Homer, entirely without fatigue, was climbing up the inside of the shed to get into the overhang. The spider continued to sit and watch, though they couldn’t imagine it staying still terribly long once he moved the tarp aside. With as much control as they could manage in the moment, they popped the clasp on the hatchet’s sheath.

The world felt like it was in slow motion as several things then happened at once, beginning with Homer taking hold of the tarp and pulling with so much force that the tarp seemed to disappear from it’s moorings in a cloud of dust. In the moment it took for the sheath to come loose, they gripped the hatchet in front of themselves. Their palm braced on the back of the head, and the blade toward Homer’s face. Homer, processing this, just grinned and made no move other than opening his mouth. Logically this was probably to taunt them, but they were about two hours too far into this whole shitshow to care beyond the fact that the blade connected.

Falling, as had been established through their life, has never been difficult. It’s just letting gravity decide how much things were going to hurt when you ran into them after it yanks at you as hard as it ever does, but at a different angle. Landing is usually the issue, but it’s also usually very simple: don’t land on sharp things, and don’t hit your head. When holding a hatchet, it gets a touch more complicated—not that any part of their brain was doing _math_ at that point.

The only thing that passed through the gray pudding of their brain at the time, was how terrible a sound was made when dozens of teeth scrape against hardened steel.

Reality, as it often does, caught up rather quickly once physics remembered to be a part of the conversation. They had hit their mark, and the momentum had sent both of them the five feet from the overhang to the wall opposite. The blade had caught between a few molars at the back of his throat, about the time one of his hands came up and more rammed into their throat than grabbed at it. All this while their combined weight dragged his back against the wall, chicken wire clawing into his clothes and skin. This friction slowed him faster, and sent them sprawling over the various bits of fencing on the ground before he came slamming down on top of them. Unlike their body, which bounced when it hit the ground, he gave them no such buffer to action. The hatchet, thankfully, kept well in their grip through the fall. April put as much leverage as they had into a swing, gasping through the impact and the dust coating their throat. Homer’s arm blocked the swing at their wrist and their hiss in response was cut off by a blow from his free arm.

“Listen here, you little bitch--” His grip on their throat was tight enough to keep them still, but not to start blacking them out. He was making a _point_ and that made the blood in their ears pound all the harder. “I _said_ listen, you fucking--”

Another punch to the face, and they heard rather than immediately felt one of their teeth cracking. Thankfully, as they struggled under him, it hadn’t come apart—they really didn’t need choking on teeth to be another thing to worry about. He hit them in the mouth again, pushing away the arm with the hatchet. Then it was a continued assault with his free hand, as their other hand flailed uselessly against him.

Around this time they became vaguely aware of the fact he’d stopped guarding his right side to have a hand to punch their face with. Now, being pounded against metal and dirt while your throat filled with blood wasn’t a wonderful outcome, but sometimes you have to take what you’re given. They also noticed, about the same time, that he was getting slowly _lighter_. The part of April that had the ability to do anything but scream and writhe, tried desperately to do so in a way that got more of their upper body free. Mostly, they screamed and bellowed like something possessed and that seemed to annoy Homer more than the moving around did.

“ _I said listen! Shut up and listen!_ ” This time, he leaned forward and held them down by their throat with both hands. They continued to struggle, but it was now far, far harder not to see with crystal clarity what his mouth was actually doing to make noises. Though, it was less a mouth at that point, and more a bisected display at his current dental collection. The blow had taken the corners of his mouth and hitched them to where the hinge of the jaw would have been, before gravity had relocated the blade down the right side of his throat, then down to where it had bounced off the corded wires that made his clavicle. Like a vengeful geode, his neck bared hundreds and hundreds of teeth, covered in shifting powder. He squeezed tighter and looked like he was trying to grin down at them, but it looked more like a ruined sneer. “I’m gonna enjoy this, you little bitch.”

With a jerk, he pulled forward and slammed them back down onto the fencing. Their garbled cry as a corner of the panels dug into their head seemed to make him so, _so_ very happy. He shifted so his right knee pinned their chest down and he _pressed_.

“I’m not even going to wear you. No, _you_ get to come dan--” He didn’t get to finish the sentence before, with a mighty twist of their torso, they flipped him off to the left and into a pile of wood. Before he could react, they continued the arch of their arm and brought the hatchet down hard on the crown of his head. They weren’t hoping for a stun, they weren’t hoping for much really. They could just taste the blood on their tongue and hear it rushing in their ears, and knew it would end in quiet either way.

Until then, all they needed was the sound of steel on cable as they ripped and tore away any power he had inside. Later, when they were slightly less out of it, they would recall just how loud the sounds were as they slammed him around the shed. How it echoed as they forced him through the holes in the fencing panel and knotted him there. How his screaming felt like it was looped as they staggered their way to the community burn pile three blocks down, and lit it on fire, with Homer’s panel on top. The cracking of the fire certainly had looped as they started feeling the exact spots on their feet that splinters were now taking up residence. They saw no spiders as they left wet, faltering footprints all the way home. They also did not see the dried and cracked silk coating the hatchet’s handle when they dropped it on the kitchen counter. After sweeping through the house and locking up again in what they assumed was a futile grab at security, they finally started to process how much things hurt.

Around the time they’d managed to crawl their way from the entryway and into the kitchen to patch themselves up, their brother June had come home. He looked between the still darkening bruises all over their face, the frankly unnerving pile of bloody towels next to them, and the state of their pj’s with a frown. He then quietly locked the door behind him. For their part, April tried to focus enough to start using tweezers on their foot splinters before they worked further in.

“April.”

“Yeah, June?”

He put his hands together and pressed them against his lower lip, watching them lean over to spit blood into the sink.

“What, pray tell, the _fuck_ happened while I was at school?”

“Things.” They took a deep breath and pulled a splinter out of the heel of their foot. “Stuff. General badness.”

“April, what was it this time?” He dropped his backpack by the door and tried getting a closer look at some of the wounds that had started clotting over. They opened their mouth, and then closed it, wincing as their tooth reminded them of the whole cracked thing. He gave them a flat look as they tried to squirm. “And no bullshit about falling off something—what happened?”

A heavy sigh as he took the tweezers and pulled a chair over to help deal with the splinter situation. They watched him carefully tug out bits of wood, even if it was a bit delicate of a task. He’d always been more of a large scale kid, but he was trying. Certainly, he was doing better than they had at twelve.

“Got in a fight.”

“With what, a train?”

“Yup.” They winced as he pulled another splinter out, and had to go back in for a piece that broke off. “Got into a fight with some wild trains. They were chasing a cat, so I had to interfere.”

He looked at them for a long moment, before going back to their foot.

“Was the train hauling sawdust?”

A long pause as they emptied their mouth again.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think the train’ll come back?”

“I…” They groaned as he finished one foot, gesturing for them to give him the other one. Doing so, they winced at a chunk wedged into their heel. That one, they assumed, was probably why it hurt so much walking around. June, being a younger sibling, started with that one first while he waited for an answer. “Probably. Not that train, specifically, but some train.”

He frowned, picking at one of the smaller bits.

“I don’t like when you get hurt, you know that.”

“I know.”

“So stop getting hurt!” His frown deepened, and it looked entirely out of place on him. He waved the tweezers for emphasis. “If you try telling mom and dad again, they’ll help--”

“No they won’t, June.” They sighed and started putting band aids over the pinpricks caused by the fencing, if only so they didn’t have to look at them. He started to argue, but a look at their expression told him it wouldn’t change anything. They were so tired, in so many ways, and the weight of that made him uncomfortable. “We both know what they think about… this. Mom’ll frown, dad’ll scream at me for protecting whoever beat the shit out of me, because he thinks I’m lying about notpeople. They’ll both be mad, they’ll yell and then get mad when we hide in our rooms to stay out of the way. And then mom will blame me for making dad mad, and it’ll start all over. You _know_ that.”

He started picking at his pant leg with the tweezers, and frowning harder. Their heart hurt to see it, not just the frustration, but the fact he wanted desperately to make this all okay, when there was literally nothing to be done. About their parents, about the monsters, and about the fact that there is no escaping either. How were they, they wondered as they waited, to pass on something like ‘be brave’ to their little brother? The little boy that still got extremely excited when a show about engineering was on, and used every VHS he could find to make buildings and towers. The little boy that had hid under their covers when he got nightmares, because he knew their parents would just tell him it was a dream. That dreams can’t hurt you. Their brother, their baby brother with all the kindness and joy to him that they never even considered an option during childhood. How are they supposed to explain the lead weight of realization in their stomach, that they were either going to die by a monster running them ragged, or by their body giving up on them. How were they supposed to say that they—his protector, his big sibling that loved him no matter what—were at peace with their inevitable end? Being brave covered none of that.

“I just want you to be safe.” He said, finally, tears thick in his voice if nothing else. With a sniffle, the dam started to break just a bit. “I don’t… I don’t want you to hurt anymore.”

“Love you too.”

“Stop smiling at me, I’m having an, an emotional moment! And you’re still bleeding on things! Stoppit!”

Pain in the ribs aside, it was good for a laugh. He even managed to look petulant about giving them a hug before he took over bandage duty. For his sake, they waited until they were fully patched up to make their way over to the phone and punch in the number for the Magnus Institute. They even managed to look reasonably alive while he took his bag to his room to start on homework. It lasted about as long as eye contact did, but they figured Shelley wouldn’t need them vertical to have a conversation.

* * *

_You’ve reached the desk of Michael Shelley, archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, London. I’m not at the phone right now, but if you’d like to leave a message with your name and number, I’ll get back to you ASAP! Thanks, have a wonderful day!_

“Shelley, I know it’s like… listen, I can’t do math right now. Its five here, afternoon? I just… You know how I said I’d be brave? I’m trying, man, but shit keeps getting worse. The shadow isn’t even a problem, it’s not even doing—well, it is, I just don’t _care_ anymore. I’m so far beyond giving a shit that I might actually be calm? A—about that at least. I just. Homer, from the statement—i don’t know if it made it through, you haven’t gotten back to me, but I hope it did—he came over today. Threatened my brother. I, well I’m not— _fine_ wouldn’t be in the same zip code. It’s not even in this country I think. I made it out, fucked him up—Homer, not my brother. June’s fine. June… will be fine. Right, yes. That’s. He needs to be okay, Shelley. I—I don’t care if they kill me. I’m _way_ past that, now. I just want him to be okay. I need—Okay, focus May. Focus. I just gotta remember to, to breathe. Right.”

A deep breath that sent static over the line. It didn’t help as much as they hoped it would have.

“He, he had other notpeople with him, and they’re learning again. They have cords now, like that shit they make bridges from? Or, or zip lines. And they’re layering wires. I don’t know how long it’s going to be before ripping them open doesn’t _work_ anymore. I don’t have other options! I don’t know what else… Please, Shelley, please just. Just call back when you can. I’m going to keep trying to be brave, but brave doesn’t mean shit if it gets people killed.”

* * *

That evening ran about how they expected it to: they hobbled around as best they could, checking windows and doors, until their parents got home and chewed them out. June tried to defend them, bless him, and he was told off for ‘making things up’. After he was sent to his room, they were sat down in the living room and chewed out for about two hours. Topics of said lecture varied between admonishing them for being crazy, for making their brother crazy, and hurting themselves in a way the neighbors might see. Some commentary about how they were lucky it was still spring, so long sleeves and make up wouldn’t make the family look bad. To their parent’s credit, they actually listened to April’s story in full before their father started going on about having them committed—which, they felt, was some kind of record.

“I’ll drive you up to medical lake, personally—is that what you want? You wanna be locked up in the nut house?” Their father growled from his recliner, only sitting up enough to look like he might spring forward at any moment. They tried very hard to keep their eyes on his face—too long looking away and he said they were ignoring him, too long looking in his eyes and it was a challenge, but around his nose was fine. The words he was saying were getting fuzzy around the edges and they deeply didn’t have energy for literally any of this, really. They focused back in to realize he’d kept talking. “—electrocute you until you can’t see straight, then lock you up and forget you’re there! That what you want?”

“No.” The response was automatic—too long silent and they were ignoring him, too long an answer and they were talking back. April didn’t know if they cared about the threat of being admitted, anymore. Growing up a bit had left them with a vastly different view of mental health than their parents had given them. Not that it changed the lectures. It still unsettled them, somewhere under the exhaustion and distress of other things, that them being sent away and forgotten was something their father so easily reached for. At some point that would hurt more, but at the moment all they had to hurt them was their own body.

“And another thing—” They tried to blink through the shifting colors around their vision enough to hear properly. The sensation was as strange as the sentence. April deeply wished that the door knew how to read the goddamn room, but honestly it might be entirely too good at it. The outline of their parents started waving in place as they gestured with their speech. “Hey! Earth to fucking space case, anything going on in there?”

“Sorry, I’m just tired.” They blinked furiously, trying to focus more as he seemed to determine their discomfort was due to him. “Sorry.”

“Do you have _any_ clue what I was saying?”

They scrambled for literally any scrap of conversation, but the inside of their skull felt like it was crawling with bees. Almost like a migraine starting, but infinitely harder to think through. It took almost all the willpower they were putting into sitting up straight, but they managed after a moment.

“The… the phone?”

“Right.” His smile was not pleased. “You need to cut out the long distance calls. You already cost too much fucking money to keep making calls to fucking Mystery Inc.! Do you know how much money we had to shit for your classes? Then you fuck off, and piss away all that money and your future, all because _boohoo_ you’re still afraid of the dark! _Oh poor me, I’m bad with faces so that’s everyone else’s problem_! I’m not shelling out fifty bucks every other day so you can call someone up and rant like a maniac!”

The last word echoed over and over in their ears, and they didn’t know if it was the door or simple exhaustion over their father being like this. If it weren’t for the fact they were looking, they wouldn’t have noticed he’d kept talking. As if on command, the echo increased in pitch and speed. He was still talking but it was too—too loud and they couldn’t— All the information was there, but the words didn't process, the movements didn't make sense and--

“I can’t—Sorry, I can’t hear—” They’d covered their ears, as if that would help, and tried to fight the feeling of vertigo. The sound hit a fever pitch as their father started yelling, and finally, _finally_ broke when he kicked their chair. They almost fell out of it, but they were just so glad for the relative quiet of the yelling. It took a lot to care about how angry their dad was, but only slightly less to care about the look of disappointment on their mother as they fought tears of relief.

Thankfully the door seemed content to spend the rest of the night in their ceiling, playing a congealed mess of sounds.

Somewhere in there, they thought they heard laughing—a real hag-fish slime of a sound. Thick, stringy in the ears, and had a quality about it that left a bad taste in their mouth. It came about the time that tendrils of color started leaking out around the door frame, slithering across the white ceiling and tainting the surface a technicolor headache. One arm would cycle through primary colors, moving in right angles and dripping thick ropes of pigment along itself, with those forming their own angles. Another, thinner, arm arched from a corner and shown neon as it seemed to sprout more and more branches—each one sprouting two more and so on, until April’s eyes crossed. Yet another sprout was a viscous and chunk filled sludge that they could swear was dripping onto their bedspread, but seemed to evaporate as it fell. Behind it all was a golden spiral that began at the doorknob. This shining line wove into, under, over, and somehow around the growing film of color above them. No matter how much they willed themselves to look away, their eyes latched onto the knob. Even when they forced their eyes closed, and put a pillow over their own face, they could still see it. Not because they could see through these things, but because it felt impossible that they wouldn’t see it, even when they weren’t looking.

They put the lack of compulsive desire to touch it, down to how they were feeling. Not that they didn’t want to try—their palms itched in the vague shape of the knob, and they could almost imagine something blinding on the other side. But they were _tired_ , and if they weren’t going to die from notpeople that night, they certainly would not knock on the spooky door when they were reasonably sure they wouldn’t survive it. The feeling on their palms worsened over time, but didn’t spread.

They didn’t know exactly when they fell asleep, but they were entirely aware of becoming observed.

* * *

_You’ve reached the desk of Michael Shelley, archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, London. I’m not at the phone right now, but if you’d like to leave a message with your name and number, I’ll get back to you ASAP! Thanks, have a wonderful day!_

“Well Shelley, it’s now ten in the morning, and the night went about as I expected it to. Told my parents what happened—they think I’m crazy, but that’s not new.”

Their sigh betrayed the feeling of defeat in their words, but it was swiftly cut off.

“I forgot to mention, but I burned Homer. Tied him to a fence panel and torched the community burn pile with him on it. I don’t know if the metal’ll be too screwed up to use, but I do know he stopped screaming by the time I left. I checked the slash pile this morning, before sun up. Just to make sure it… to make sure he’s done. I don’t know if Homer melted, or if… god, I wish I could just say fire fixed this shit. I just know he and his teeth were not inside, from what I could see. I tried to keep June home from school today, but I was outvoted. I keep checking the windows and I don’t know if that’s making it more or less obvious. I… I thought I had a theory going on why, but its… its so hard to remember things right now. The door—It’s so loud. Even just breathing—I miss the quiet. I miss the spiders. Please, please just… tell me you know something.”

* * *

_You’ve reached the desk of Michael Shelley, archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, London. I’m not at the phone right now, but if you’d like to leave a message with your name and number, I’ll get back to you ASAP! Thanks, have a wonderful day!_

They were silent for a good few moments, trying to think why they were in the kitchen, and who they’d called. It had gotten so hard to think, so hard to follow things as they were and should be. They swayed a bit, the message playing in their head a few times. It was like trying to catch the fluff of a specific dandelion, while there were just _so_ many around. Who were they, anyway? Why did they care about dandelions, or fluff? Who were they calling? They didn’t have any friends, not any more. The only person they’d spoken to on the phone had been— Realization hit them like a truck, brushing away the fog enough to get talking.

“Shelley, it’s me—April. I’m April. I think I’m—why did I… I called but, I’m not supposed to call… But I am? No, no I’d need something to call about and I don’t… I called! It did… something.”

They paused for a long moment, and almost set the phone back on the cradle, before their mind cleared just long enough to put a thought together. With audible scrambling, they yanked the phone back to their ear. They had just enough clarity to hope the machine didn’t pick up the swearing when the plastic hit over their cracked tooth.

“ _Shelley!_ The door, it’s making things loud yeah but—but it’s making my brain strange. More than usual. I try to remember something about it that will help me, and next thing I know… I don’t. I don’t know if this will help, but I’m--”

Suddenly, their ears hummed with a sick static, and the feeling of a thick cotton packing settled into their skull. It was hard to think, and hard to speak. But it was _so easy_ to forget and go back to business. Just get back to whatever else they had to do. Didn’t they deserve something easy to handle? Didn’t they deserve to not stress about—With a loud groan, they pushed back on the feeling and smacked at the counter top to give themselves a sensation to focus on.

“No, I can’t—Shelley, Shelley, it’s making me forget things. But, but forget the wrong way. Stuff’s leaving without—Like if you put something off long enough, and you know it’s there because _of course_ it is, but you—no that’s not right. That’s not—Shelley, you’re Shelley, and I’m April and I will not forget. It wants—I don’t know. I forget things, but it’s not like normal, where you lose your glasses and remember putting them on top of your head and feel stupid after. It’s like you look in the mirror and see the glasses, and you recognize them, but you can’t tell from where. You know them, but you don’t, and you want to know why you don’t know them, but when you put words to it—It, it’s gone. Its just fog, and then you blink and the glasses are strange again.”

Their breathing hitched, as they leaned heavily against the counter and tried to fight off the cotton fuzz.

“It wants me to do that with things—Important things.It wants me to stop taking my pills, and I can’t. I—I can’t do that with my meds, Shelley. I don’t know if I’ll die, I can’t remember, but it won’t be good. It wouldn’t be safe for me to forget. I can’t forget what’s wrong with me. What’s important, either. My little brother, or all the creatures trying to—I, I need to remember. I need to know, and I…”

Another groan accompanying a fresh smack to the counter, and they tried to ignore the static on the line.

“I don’t know what it _is_ , or what it _is_ doing, but I know what it _isn’t_. It isn’t a door, and it isn’t a person, and it is not safe to be around. And it doesn’t want me to know that. It does not like being known. I think—I think it made me forget how to remember, but this is helping. I think I remember now.”

They sucked in a breath and waited. Sure enough, after a few seconds the feeling started again—behind the ears and across the crown, thick batting that muffled their thoughts before spilling down their spine and robbing them of fine sensations. Before the fuzz settled in fully, they clenched their jaw, _hard_. With a yelp, they dropped the phone to the counter and it slid off as searing pain shot from their tooth, up through their face. The fog didn’t clear instantly, but it was close enough. Once the majority of stars cleared out of their vision, they groped for the phone cord and hauled it back up. It wasn’t total control, but it was enough that they bothered wondering if Shelley would mind their yelling on his answering machine. They figured he could live, because this next part was important.

“Shelley, listen, if you take nothing from this—the way you remember is to hurt. I don’t know if it’s grounding or if pain is the only thing it can’t screw with—but I need to hurt. I need to, to keep alive and to know what’s happening. If you call back and I don’t know who you are, tell me to push on my right cheek. I don’t know if I’ll do it, but if you can get me to humor you, I’ll be okay. I can forget a lot, I can forget everything—but that? That feeling of a thousand needles jammed into my gums, throbbing away? May as well be my goddamn heartbeat at this point. I don’t know where you are, Shelley, but _holy shit_. I’ll take that fucking win. Even if it’s my last, at least someone will know how to fight this thing.”

Another pause before letting out a sigh.

“I hope you’re okay, out there, Shelley. I hope I didn’t drag you into anything you didn’t see coming. Be safe.”

* * *

Slowly, languidly perhaps, April dialed the phone with one hand while watching their front door. They could afford a bit of flowery language tonight, they decided, as shadows passed by the window to the porch. Everything was locked, and barricaded as much as they could manage—well, they left the window in the bathroom clear, but unless the notpeople could suddenly be three inches wide, they felt it was safe. Safe, they decided, was a hilariously incorrect term for their current situation. A small part of them felt bad for giving into laughter while they waited for the phone to finish ringing and just get to the message—it wasn’t really fitting to laugh. Not when you were probably about to die. The figured, as the now familiar whine of the machine kicking on hit them, they could afford some absurdity before they made it to the breaking shit phase.

_You’ve reached the desk of Michael Shelley, archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, London. I’m not at the ph—_ **Click.**

The line was suddenly not Shelley’s voice, and instead was full of someone entirely new.

“Magnus Institute, archival assistant Sarah Carpenter speaking. What do you need from the Archives, today?”

They assumed the novelty would get them through at least the next few seconds. The tone told them this Sarah had rushed to answer the phone, and really they didn’t know why she bothered. Not her fault, they supposed. Shame, they’d been looking forward to thanking Shelley for at least trying to help them.

“Hello, Sarah, you work with Shelley?”

“Yes?” The sound of shuffling papers was almost enough to distract from the sounds of discussion on the other side of their front door. They liked that door, too. Had the decency to just be a door. “Er, I’m sorry who—”

“April May, dead human walking.” A pause to allow her answering sound of confusion before they started pacing. “Now, I don’t have a lot of time, so this is going to be short. I need you to make sure Shelley gets my messages and knows I’m thankful he tried. I have a file in there, somewhere, supposedly—now, I want you to write down what I’m going to say and fucking, I don’t know, highlight important parts. Can you do that, Sarah?”

“Why do you think you’re going to die?” She was to the point, they gave her that. More scrambling for paper and they could hear the impact of something hitting the floor. That was far less important to them than the sound of a clicking pen. “Is there a way out?”

“Look it up later, but notpeople are here to kill me. There’s a mob of them outside my front door and I can literally hear them discussing who gets to kick my teeth in first. Well, and which window to break to distract me from said door, but I assume that’s because they’re all fucking idiots.” A pause as they heard something testing the back door, and the various locks straining a bit before the test stopped. More tapping along the side of the house, then, with harder blows against the window frame there. “Idiots with a grudge. I made the house as safe as I could all considered, but that also means exits are thin on the fucking ground. So, basically, I’m fucked and there’s no way out. I do have a hatchet, a few knives, and a machete if I decide I’m feeling spicy. Don’t think it’ll do much good, though. They don’t _bleed_ , so that’s on my list of problems.”

They were mildly surprised when they picked up the sounds of her scribbling furiously on the other end. Either Shelley worked with cool people, or there was a notperson feeling very in character somewhere in London right now.

“I have questions, and if you can’t answer them it’s fine.”

“Shoot, but make it fast.” They heard one of the windows at the back of the house break. From the following clatter, it was one of the smaller ones in their parents bedroom. Not big enough to let a full sized one through, but it wouldn’t take much to get through if they bent the frame hard enough. “ _Really_ fast.”

“How many are there, best guess?”

They heard crunching from down the hall.

“One definitely inside, two.. four in the far end of the house. Ten voices outside the door.”

“Are you going to fight?”

“Yup.” There were footsteps heading through the house, and the sound of locks being yanked open. Pounding started on the front door. April braced themselves for when it would break open. “They’re coming in.”

“Survive.”

“Not a question.”

That’s as far into their commentary April got before a whole gaggle of notpeople came barreling into the kitchen, pivoting as a group on sight of them. They spared half a thought to Sarah’s ears by only dropping the phone to the counter and not the floor.

“April? April, are you there?” Sarah very much didn’t like the fact that all she had to go on, now, was sounds of impact and swearing. She assumed it was April screaming after a few hits, and winced at a particularly pained gasp. She very much wanted to hang up, because listening to someone being beaten to death was not high on her list of things she wanted to do during a workday, but she couldn’t just—if the last thing this person wanted to do was reach out and try to leave a message for Michael of all people—she was going to be there. As a witness, if nothing else. Another groan rose from the other end, and a mix of laughter that didn’t sound right. “April?”

The voice that came next was clearer, and possibly closer, but it didn’t sound friendly. Sarah wasn’t sure when she’d flipped to a new page of notes and started writing what happened, but she was sure that she couldn’t stop now.

“You know, I expected something more than… well, this. I’m kind of disappointed.” The voice was male, tenor, and stretched his I’s. He clicked his tongue, and she presumed, kicked April if the gasp and swearing that came after meant anything. “Ma Spider cut her strings _already_? And here Sam was all worried about it—can you believe? He honestly thought something might care enough about _you_ to be angry about your death. Funniest joke he’s ever told, actually.”

Another gasp and gagging, accompanying the sound of what she assumed was April being pushed into something.

“Come on, April! Isn’t it funny?” Another impact, followed by gagging and a groan. “Where’s your sense of humor? Give us a joke!”

“Fuck off, Homer.” Sarah took a small comfort in the fact they could talk, at the very least. A few more impacts and a clatter as something small skipped across the floor. Their breathing evened out over a backdrop of off kilter laughter. “ _Ha_.”

“What’s the joke? Or did you realize fighting wasn’t gettin--”

“Realized you’re a shit dentist. You’re just not good at a goddamn thing, are you?”

Another impact, and the crunch that went with it was not reassuring.

“You’re in no position to talk shit, brat.”

“I think I am.”

“How’s that?” This time, the space was filled with a totally normal version of laughter—choking in places, and rough for obvious reasons, but human. Another impact set it sputtering but it ended with the sound of spitting, so it hadn’t killed them. “Well? Enlighten me, oh ye of the unwanted. What makes you think you can be funny, when I’m about to snap your bones? Because I’m going to. _**Slowly.**_ One by one, until you pass out. Then, we’ll wait for you to come to and keep going. On and on until you bleed out internally. Wouldn’t want to ruin that skin before we put it on stage. So: _**What’s. So. Funny**_?”

“Physics, mostly.”

The final word was punctuated by the sound of something very heavy hitting the ground, followed by what Sarah could best describe as frantic scraping of chairs against linoleum, and the sound of snapping wood.

“You can’t win this—” Homer started, before two things cut him off. One, the sound of what Sarah hoped was a chair breaking over whatever a notperson was made of, and breaking glass. Second, was a rising, rhythmic sound surrounded by static that started to overtake the line. She could make out some more yelling, April cursing and an impact that sent the phone receiver skittering across the counter and to the floor. The static reached a fever pitch, forcing her to hold the phone away from her ear—and then, sudden as it began, the line was quiet outside of slight shuffling.

“Where _the fuck_ did she go?” It was the male voice again, and she could hear him tossing things around. “ _Where the fuck did she go?_ ”

“I think…”

“Sam, I swear to the Stranger itself, if you fucking say it was the Mother of Puppets, I will personally throw you in a bonfire.” A long silence. “What?”

“They went through a door.”

“Son of a—”


	5. O61: Voice Mail

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where i post a middle bit so i can dive into Spiral shenanigans before i zone out too much. Also Eric customize ur voicemail challenge

The number of times that the Ceaseless Watcher had been kind enough to let Gertrude Robinson in on useful information in her years as Archivist, could be counted on the knuckles of one finger. Information that she wasn’t already half way into figuring out herself, took the number down to a whole two things and those were primarily because she had to sleep at some point. All this to say that very little in her day to day life was much of a surprise, and if it was, it didn’t tend to be relevant to the things that went bump in the night and skinned people for fun. It was usually that Michael brought in bread because he’d decided baking was his hobby of the month, or that Eric would take a whiteboard out of storage for the express purpose of making a leader board of ‘clearly false statements’ because he’d had to deal with one too many teenagers on magic mushrooms.

It was not, generally, the sudden awareness of Sarah in the assistants bullpen, tearing her way through Michael and Eric’s desks, while trying to explain something to Emma. This was different than just hearing her—something that was certainly not difficult—due entirely to the fact that Gertrude had a crystal clear image of Sarah’s frantic motions, in addition to the reasoning behind them long before she had started making a beeline toward the office.

 **… _the gatherers have a_ _llowed information to be lost_ _._** Floated through her head, along with the mental image of a room in shadow occasionally illuminated by flashing police lights. Nothing about it was particularly familiar, but it didn’t take a bit of eldritch knowledge to recognize the piles of sawdust and splashes of blood on the floor as a pattern. It felt off to her, but not in the way a trip through May’s nightmares normally would. She assumed something had finally punched their number, and that there had been other things the Eye had wanted to stare at before it happened. Not that this explained why the information was now inside her head.

Gertrude had about half a second to finish that thought as Sarah threw her door open, the knob bouncing against the wall as she crossed the threshold.

“Something the matter, Sarah?”

“Gertrude, I know how this is going to sound, but I think I just heard someone being eaten alive.”

A beat of silence while they looked at each other. Gertrude processing what she was saying, in addition to how to respond—schooled expression aside. Sarah was more trying to figure out how to word the whole ordeal in a way that didn’t make her sound entirely mad.

“Eaten alive by _what_?”

“The door, from the May file—they called in and expected Michael, but I’d answered because I’d just gotten in.” She took a breath and a seat, not that Gertrude offered for her to take either. A deep breath later, Sarah continued in a much calmer tone. “They said they were being besieged by notpeople—haven’t looked into the file on those yet, but I imagine they’re related to all of the uncanny valley things we keep seeing—and they’d called to thank Michael for trying to help them. Honestly don’t know what _Michael_ could have been doing for them, but I wasn’t going to tell them _no_ when they were so sure, you know? They said there were at least a dozen there for them, and one they managed to identify as Homer after being knocked around. It sounded like they broke free and were making a run for it—I don’t know if the door covered the normal one, or it just got in the way, but there was enough distortion to the phone line that it was probably close. I don’t know how close Michael and Eric are, but they aren’t answering their mobiles, and—”

The look Gertrude was giving her was rather clearly one of ‘sum up and get on with it’, and she sighed.

“I wanted to know how long it’d been since they’d checked in. If something big _is_ happening in Washington, I don’t think leaving them in the dark would help anything. That, and Michael’s so attached…”

“Which is precisely why I have not been updating him on the May situation, beyond what is strictly necessary. That said, if you believe they should be worried—” Gertrude withdrew one of her pens from the cup she kept of them in, and scribbled down a series of numbers on a sticky note. Sarah took it with a raised eyebrow as she continued. “They should be about a day out from the May residence, making reception spotty. If you want to give them this information, use the first number after Eric’s phone picks up, and the second for Michael’s. It should put whatever you leave at the top of the priority list. That said, you know Michael and how he’s likely to take this.”

Another prolonged shared look.

“He’ll want to know, and he _should_ know. He’s put months into this case, now.” Sarah’s expression didn’t falter in the face of her boss’s unreadable expression.

“He’s also extremely attached to it. Emotionally.”

“Which is exactly why I’ll tell him what’s happened.” Sarah paused as Gertrude leaned back in her chair, studying her. It was less a clear nudge in the direction Gertrude would like her to take, and more an unspoken gesture toward where she hoped Sarah would go. “…After I tell Eric what they’ll be walking in to.”

Gertrude nodded and sat forward, reopening one of the folders on her desk. It was more to signal that she was done talking unless Sarah wasn’t, than much to do with the actual content of the file she was looking at. Not that Vincent Yang and his time in the Buried wasn’t fascinating—a new vector into it’s domain, possibly even a lighter version of the coffin and perhaps a signal of changes—but the last thing she was actually able to do was to stop looking at something the Eye was so focused on. Focused might not have been the correct word, if it even _could_ focus on anything. Currently interested in might have been closer, but likely not accurate either. She half acknowledged Sarah leaving her office, mostly staring at the written statement in front of her.

Arduous was a good word for how it felt to try focusing away from what the Eye seemed to want, even with her precautions. If she allowed for the idea that the fears could in fact want something, allowed herself to anthropomorphize them enough to understand them, it became almost too easy to sit—mentally—near where she imagined a member of one of the various cults would be in terms of understanding. It was terribly uncomfortable, if she was honest, but it was also sometimes useful to dip into that interpretation. If the fears were able to want things, and were interested in things by extension, it would make sense that those tied to the entities would be effected by those whims. As Archivist, it was hardly even remarkable—using this train of thought—to consider that she would be somewhat possessed of it’s inclinations. Even as she did her level best to avoid becoming beholden to it, she still felt it. Still felt her heart race a bit at a mystery or new bit of information. It was, then, logical that she should be feeling a sense of… acute discomfort if it was displeased.

What didn’t make a terrible amount of sense, even in the framework of this idea, was the overwhelming sense of unease that had accompanied the mental image before. Letting the feeling come on with no fight was easier, but also deeply unnerving. It felt awfully like she had, personally, failed it in some way. That, through chain of command, she had allowed answers to go unknown.

With a sigh, she returned to sitting back in her chair, with eyes fixed on the ceiling. At the very least, she decided, she could follow this train of thought until the feeling stopped.

May’s case was novel, and therefore full of interesting tidbits. New expressions of certain powers, following the idea that the entities had will in any way, meant new information to catalog. New tricks up someone's sleeve that could be used against them, new niches to exploit while breaking apart their plans. Granted, that last bit was more her prerogative, but it might as well roll into the Eye’s agenda. The combination of Hunt and Dark into the monster dogging May’s movements, and their unfortunate run in with the Stranger, would mean quite enough on their own. Adding in the machinations of the Web that she still hadn’t puzzled out, even in part, on top of the Spiral’s involvement… As Eric had suggested, it could have been a _where_ issue that spilled over into someone unlucky enough to survive first contact. If that had been the case, she could have put it to the side and kept looking into other information—not that this had fully stopped her, but it was an odd nagging at the back of her mind. If it were simply a _where_ issue, that would cover some of the players involved, but it doesn’t answer the question of _why_.

If it were a _who_ issue, on the other hand, then May would have had to trip into some extraordinary bad luck. Or been pulled. The Web dragging someone through the ringer on it’s own agenda didn’t sound terribly far fetched, and if May was a plaything of the Web, they might have been used against it. Related to that, if the Buried was indeed prodding around in preparation for a ritual—and the seismic data indicated that _something_ was stirring in the state, but details were eluding her—then it could stand to reason that the other powers would want to put a stop to it. Putting a stop to it would mean _finding_ it, and that would be consistent with the Circus bothering to send creatures out for more than a quick survey. That part checked out well enough, and if she were pressed she could reason that the Stranger latched onto some petty vendetta as part of it’s performance. The Dark never needed a terribly substantial reason to haunt the sleep of small children, but when it worked with another extremely primal fear, found in the Hunt, it would explain the Shadow well enough. Not why it bothered to take this much time to make a move, but it might well have come down to May’s apparent ability to rationalize and keep calm. That, or the Hunt simply relished the chase too much for it to be tempered by the Dark’s more immediate nature. That brought her to the generally nonsensical factor: The Door. The Spiral’s involvement, when taken in isolation, she could put down to similar circumstances to Michael’s friend being taken. A mind already depending heavily on verifiable information, clinging to the safety net of what _had_ to be real, and true, and knowable—May was providing it a veritable house of cards to gently nudge apart before a single breath could cause the collapse. Though, from Michael’s account of the incident with his friend—given haltingly over a box of tissues before leaving for Seattle—Ryan had less been grounded with a slow chipping of his sanity, and more hounded by the constant knowledge of his inability to trust the truth. It would have been childishly easy to prove him right and set him into a downward spiral.

She let her mouth tick up slightly at her own joke, and sighed.

If she were to take the Spiral’s involvement as a whole, in concert with the other elements—it was totally possible May was at the wrong place at just the right time. It was also totally possible they were being pulled along by the Web for some reason or another, to further whatever could be called it’s agenda. It was, frustratingly, also entirely possible that the Spiral, being an antithesis to the Eye, simply knew somehow that May had been in contact with the institute and decided to speed up it’s hunt. That said, no reports she’d seen so far indicated that prolonged taunting was it’s style. A protracted hunt implied purpose, a plan, something definite that didn’t lay against her knowledge of it in the right way. That it was acting counter to the Eye, yes, that tracked. The why still eluded her, and that made the part of her mind she reluctantly admitted was entirely the Archivist extremely uncomfortable.

She assumed, then, that this was why May’s disappearance had registered at all when previous statement givers dying had hardly been more than a blip. She had missed _something_ that had, until then, been available to her and now was not. The what of it was, unfortunately, still a mystery. While it could have simply been the Eye upset at being denied another dip into the fear cocktail that was May’s life, it could also simply have been a desire for another angle on the other entities. With a sigh, she resigned herself to not knowing and promptly pushed down the wave of nausea that came with that decision. She took the small blessing that it didn’t have it’s claws in deep enough to fully lay her out when she decided something wasn’t to be pursued further.

With only a small amount of vertigo, she returned to the Yang file and got to reading.

* * *

Sarah _had_ been planning on calling first thing, after returning to her desk.

Really.

It was just… how do you even begin that phone call, let alone a message that might be heard in several hours? Simply she supposed, by just saying it. Just flat saying ‘you know that kid you talked to a few times? Yeah, I listened to them being devoured! Heads up!’ felt terribly harsh, though. It meant she had to word things so he’d have something to build off of to tell Michael, and then she had to think about what to leave on _Michael’s_ phone which was a whole different kettle of fish. She knew herself, and she knew delicate phrasing wasn’t her _best_ skill.

So, to help herself think, she started picking up the mess she made in the immediate aftermath of the phone call with April. It had been a kind of wild shifting to see if the May file was anywhere near where she’d last seen it on their desks, and then digging through where it might have been _in_ their desks. And then the frantic explanation to Emma before deciding to say fuck it, and head to tell Gertrude with the file being slated firmly in the ‘ _to find later_ ’ box. Without the initial urgency, it was a lot easier to reason out that it was probably back in the stacks. Obvious in hindsight, but its a lot harder to think clearly when you’ve just sat through the last few moments of someone’s life on a telephone. It was, she figured as she gathered up spilled supplies and scooped up pens, a whole lot easier to parse just about everything that lurks in the world when it’s only yourself doing it. Not that teamwork was bad, mind you—she loved her adventures with Emma in the field, but Emma also never seemed to be rattled at anything. Any agitation was fully between herself and the universe, which was _fine_. When she had a chance to work with Michael it was almost always something simple that spooked him. Gas leaks, a low level haunting, a single large scale one that sent him into a corner, brandishing a screaming spirit-box like a weapon. It was _simple_ then, too, to be the brave face. She would crack a joke about the ghosts being too chicken to come talk to her face, or choosing a boring manifestation, and Michael would eventually relax and join in. Simple, clear cut on what she had to do while getting to the bottom of what was really happening. Most importantly, she decided as she dropped Michael’s paper clips back into the little box he kept of them, she was then free to reach out of her little niche and explore the information ahead of her. It was a safe starting point, and she liked that. She liked the ability to retreat and think about what she’d learned. Without that ability to retreat, that informed entrance into the unknown, there was no control there. There was no _knowing_ what she was getting into.

And there was very little knowing when she walked into the office and promptly heard someone die because she answered a phone.

She righted Michael’s pen cup, and made sure all his little novelty pen toppers were back where he left them. She didn’t quite know his sorting system, but she managed to get the papers she’d moved around while looking for the May file, back into something that could generously be called ordered piles. Eric’s desk was harder, because he _did_ have a system. A very specific, exacting system that he applied even to the order of his packages of sticky notes. It was nice, letting her mind wander as she spent most of her brain power on if she was properly alphabetizing follow up paperwork. It was also unproductive, something that was brought up entirely by Emma clearing her throat after she’d opened and closed a drawer four times in a row.

“You have been trying to sort those papers for the last hour, Sarah. I think he’ll forgive some slight disorder over not telling him about the kidnapping.” Emma, honestly, was speaking up mostly because if she had to hear Sarah fuss with the hanging folders in his drawers one more time today, she was going to find the literal worst location to take the younger woman to. On the honest front, no she wouldn’t—there was still far too many things to push Sarah into, to test, but there was only so far her patience could stretch. On a practical level, she didn’t need to pick up Sarah’s slack, as well as Eric’s. “Or at least walking into a group of police. You know how he is.”

“I told you, Em—”

“That May was eaten, and not taken? Yes, I recall. I thought you’d appreciate some positive thinking.” She paused to adjust her reading glasses on the end of her nose. “We can always hope they stumble out somewhere, deeply confused and only lightly insane.”

“That’s better than dead, I suppose.” Sarah sat back in the chair and sighed. “I just keep thinking about… You’ve known Michael for years—certainly better than I do, how hard do you think he’ll take it?”

Emma sighed through her nose and propped her chin on her knuckles. Sarah wasn’t sure if it was to see her better, or if she just liked thinking in that position.

“I think he’ll take it extremely personally.” When she saw Sarah deflate slightly, she kept on with a disinterested tone. “Michael is a lovely young man, and has been for the years I’ve known him. That said, he’s extremely prone to becoming emotionally attached to a situation where it would be better for all concerned if he simply walked away. It’s not his fault, of course, he’s… _simple_ would be putting too fine a point on it.”

“That’s harsh.” Sarah had known the man about a year, but she also knew him to be bright and inquisitive. Being easily spooked aside, the biggest fault he’d shown was the inability to realize he was being lied to when Gertrude put on her old woman voice. She didn’t know why she and Emma did that, but she assumed it was just something they had done since the start. Still, simple was a bit too much. “He’s just very kind—”

“And totally incapable of impartiality. It’s not a terrible thing, Sarah. You asked and I’m answering. He’ll probably blame himself for the whole affair, convinced he could have done something to stop the things in this world from hurting people. Eric will likely break the news as bluntly as possible to avoid delaying the inevitable, and be helpless as Michael proceeds to come apart under the weight of all his own what if’s. He’s a good man, certainly, but he’s…” Emma pursed her lips as she searched for the right words. “Unsuited to a lot of the work we do here, and all that comes with it. There’s a reason he and Eric go on their little stake outs. He’s wonderful at interpreting data, and drawing conclusions, and making connections—but he’s terrible when faced with anything more tangible than a ghost. All the more reason you and I get to go out and about like we do.”

Sarah tugged idly at the corner of a notepad to line it up with Eric’s desk calendar.

“Hmm.” She picked up Eric’s phone and punched in the number for his mobile, chewing at her bottom lip. “Just feels rotten to have to do this at all.”

“Well, here’s hoping you don’t get used to it.”

* * *

_At the tone please record your message to (ERIC DELANO). At the end of your message please press { 1 }. Your call has been marked as High Priority. Thank you._

“Hello, Eric, Sarah here-- No.”

_At the tone please record your message to (ERIC DELANO). At the end of your message please press { 1 }. Your call has been marked as High Priority. Thank you._

“Eric, call the archives asap, there’s been-- Nope.”

_At the tone please record your message to (ERIC DELANO). At the end of your message please press { 1 }. Your call has been marked as High Priority. Thank you._

“Sarah here, I know receptions’ bad out there, but it would be really helpful if you could pick up. Or just have Michael check his—ah, balls, that’d be _worse_.”

_At the tone please record your message to (ERIC DELANO). At the end of your message please press { 1 }. Your call has been marked as High Priority. Thank you._

“There’s been a development in the May case. You should expect police when you get to their place. They haven’t done anything, actually something—oh hell.”

_At the tone please record your message to (ERIC DELANO). At the end of your message please press { 1 }. Your call has been marked as High Priority. Thank you._

“May called in and they got—They were—I listened to—Fucks sake.”

_At the tone please record your message to (ERIC DELANO). At the end of your message please press { 1 }. Your call has been marked as High Priority. Thank you._

“Eric, you’re going to have to be the one to tell him, and I’m sorry, but May’s dead and—no, I can’t just—goddamn it.”

_At the tone please record your message to (ERIC DELANO). At the end of your message please press { 1 }. Your call has been marked as High Priority. Thank you._

“Eric, I spoke to May and… I’ve tried reaching you and Michael, but you’ve not answered. To sum up: They were attacked by those notpeople things, and then taken by something. All we have is that they entered a door and didn’t leave it. I remembered that statement you’d been working on, and it might be the same thing. Last thing on the line before I hung up was police sirens and someone screaming. I don’t know how close you are to walking into that, but you should know that May’s not going to be there when you do. They wanted me to tell Michael that… They wanted to tell him thank you for helping them, and I think they’d been recording messages on his voicemail here in the office. He can call in and hear those, if he can handle it. I wrote down what they said to me, so if he wants it, I’m here. I’m going to put the transcript in the file, it’s on my desk now. Here’s hoping you can break the news without it being as bad as it felt to listen to on my end. Goodbye.”

* * *

Eric’s expression was very carefully blank as he pressed the off button on his phone. They were sitting in a roadside diner, surrounded by open scrub-land and worn furniture, while tinny oldies playing over the radio. Michael was three layers of consideration deep into the menu, chattering about what they should split before heading out again. He paused as he noticed Eric not responding to his intensive commentary on the merits of french toast, and quirked an eyebrow.

“Something the matter?” He smiled, setting down the menu and reaching for his coffee. “Did Gertrude do your performance review over voicemail, or something?”

“I’ll answer when you put down the coffee.”

“Now you’re just being ominous.” Michael nabbed a quick sip before setting down the mug and sitting up. “Well, come on. Did Elias find out about the Leitner?”

“Michael,” The smile half dropped from his face at Eric’s tone, and Eric wondered if it would be better to do this after breakfast. Outside. Away from other people. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, he’s a grown man, it’s not like he’d _break down_ in public or—yeah he would. No stopping now, though. “Something’s happened to May.”

“Eric, what does that _mean_?”

“It _means_ , that you should—That they—” Eric forced himself not to look down at the table. No use in not ripping off the plaster, he supposed. “They were taken by the door.”

“ _Oh_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep writing phone things. Why do i keep doing this.


	6. N31: What's a Speedlimit?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a week late but in my defense time isn't real and also i was/am sick.   
> Welcome to the back half of the last chapter that i forgot to write until i'd written the next chapter, and then had to fix through a fever. woo me.   
> More Michael and Eric being Michael and Eric tho
> 
> Warnings for this one include: Misgendering because April's parents are terrible, Michael blaming himself for things, and implied child abuse, because April's parents are terrible.  
> Their betrayals are many and terrible.

There are a few things that, apparently, do not fly particularly well in small town Washington restaurants. For example, the management tends to get twitchy when they watch one of a pair of people look like they’d seen a ghost, stand up, and walk outside. They get _very_ twitchy when the only person left to pick up the check gets halfway to the door before doubling back to grab the others’ bag. Thankfully for Eric, almost all of that can be dismissed by paying the whole five dollars their coffee had cost them. The rest was steadfastly ignored with the practiced ease of an old man with bigger things to worry about.

By the time he found Michael, he was laying in the middle of a parking space next to their rental car doing his best imitation of a medical problem. The blond was staring skyward with his mouth set in a very firm line, and twitching his feet. Eric prayed his knees would humor him, and lowered himself down to sit on the curb next to him.

“Floor time?” He asked with a huff. He had hoped a lighter tone would get a response. What he _got_ was a momentary flick of Michael’s eyes in his direction and back. Eric sighed and rubbed at his knees. He was the first in line to say he wasn’t _great_ with things like this. He was even less great about it when it came to _Michael_. It was like trying to explain to someone who’d never lost a pet that all dogs do, in fact, die. It was less that Michael didn’t know that—he was a grown man and had been with the institute for over a decade—and more that he hadn’t yet built up the gristle and crust on his soul that you needed in this line of work. Michael cared about people, and he was soft, and he wanted others to be _able_ to be soft. This was not a world where that was possible, and it made Eric extremely uncomfortable to be the one to point it out to him. “Is it different when you go to the literal ground?”

“I am _trying_.” Each word was very clipped, and the period dropped like a tuning fork. He didn’t continue, even though Eric waited, so he tried again.

“Trying to what?”

“I am trying to decide if this is my fault.” He’d never heard Michael’s voice sound like that before, a leaden middle tone that couldn’t decide on an emotion to express. He didn’t like it.

“A monster ate someone. That’s the fault of the _monster_ , not you.” Eric sighed as he watched Michael try unsuccessfully to dig his nails into the asphalt. He was also trying to ignore the various people looking out the diner windows at this scene. He was successful largely due to spite and facing away from them. “How could it possibly be your fault?”

The firmness in Michael’s expression started to crumble a little.

“ _I told them to be brave_. What kind of advice is that?” And now he was crying. Great, just the situation Eric knew how to handle. Yes, definitely. Thankfully Michael was covering his eyes, so Eric could look out of his depth without sharing that fact. “I told them to be _brave_ about monsters! That works for something following you, not—not— all of _that_! What was I—Was I thinking? Why did I say that?”

Eric shrugged, propping his chin on his hand.

“It was what you had. To be fair, it’s not like we’re monster hunters and they were in a terrible situation. You only knew so much, and you forked it over to someone who’d interrogated you about having bones and a face. Are there probably files in the mess Gertrude made of the archives that would have helped? Probably, because that’s the kind of luck we all have. Its still not your fault that you only knew what you knew.”

Michael dropped his arms again, wincing when his elbows hit the pavement. His eyes were swimming and he was glaring skyward again. The dam broke again on his next inhale and Eric tried not to fidget.

“I could have been there for them, Eric! I could have called them back, instead of waiting around for them to go first! I could have called before we left for Seattle, let them know someone who knew _anything_ about the situation would be looking into it outside of our library! I didn’t check back in before we left Seattle because I thought we’d be there sooner! A week, tops!” He sat up, curling his knees up to his chest and pushing his hands into his hair. “I could have called when we got into the airport, I could have—“

“You could have _what_ , Michael? Told them we were going to be in town, so they could stop worrying? That you were suddenly Van Helsing and not an archival assistant at Occult Incorporated? Even if we were there, it’s not like either of us could fight a door that specializes in scaring people _by lying about being there_. According to Sarah, they fought with some of those notpeople before it took them—an extra phone call wouldn’t have stopped that.” The look he got for that was not pleasant. The expression that spread over Michael’s face when he noticed their audience through the window behind him was also not great. Eric continued on regardless. “It was _bad luck_. The only difference between this case and any other that went bad, is that you talked to this one. Just interaction and deciding that you shared a monster. It’s not on you that it got them, and it never is.”

Michael didn’t respond, instead standing up and grabbing his bag from where Eric had dropped it in pursuit of sitting down. He paused, looking very pointedly at the people looking at him through the window—they all awkwardly looked away—before getting into the passenger side of the car. Eric took that as a cue that they were not in fact going to go back in and get food. Joining him in the car, he expected some continuation of their conversation, and received silence aside of Michael shoving his bag down to rest on his feet. With a sigh, Eric pulled out of the parking lot and kept driving north under the assumption that he’d talk when he felt like it. He sighed and glanced over at Michael, who was worrying at the stitches on the upholstery with a deep frown.

“If it helps, Sarah said they wanted to thank you.” He cleared his throat when he felt Michael staring at him intently. “For helping them. I think you did more than enough, just listening. That _is_ your fault, if anything. You made them feel heard.”

He received a much more comfortable silence for the next hour, and debated on turning on the radio just for noise. He decided against it, if only because Michael probably needed the mental space to think on things. Get composed before they actually turned up to deal with the May family. He was half way through a mental list of questions, before he noticed Michael pulling out his phone and frowning at it. He didn’t ask for clarification so much as made a curious sound that Michael returned with a pensive hum.

“I don’t think I’m going to like this very much.”

“Checking your voicemail?”

A nod that he caught out of the corner of his eye. Not that there was much else to catch—there were few other cars in sight, and the scabland portion of Washington could well have been the same hundred feet on loop and it wouldn’t have surprised him. That and Michael’s hair tended to signal any head movements well beyond his actual body, which was useful when Eric didn’t want to make him nervous by looking directly at him.

“I don’t… I want to know what they said. It’s… probably cruel to not listen.”

“And how did you come to _that_ conclusion?”

“I’d appreciate it if you tried having _some_ empathy here, Eric.” He sounded disappointed and Eric tried very hard not to groan. Instead he just grunted and shifted in his seat. “Sarah said she heard their last words, but their family didn’t! Their family has no idea what happened to them!”

“Right.”

“So, if nothing else I—I should listen and give them some record. I know their parents weren’t supportive in their last statement, but they must have noticed something as things got worse! They’re probably terribly frightened as well. Not to mention their little brother, I… It’s going to be hard for a while.” He turned his phone over in his hands, idly flipping it open and closed. “They should have some closure. Know that someone somewhere knows what happened.”

“Closure isn’t really what we do, but I appreciate going against the mission statement.”

“Can you be serious for a _single_ _bloody second_?” Michael’s teeth clicked together when he ended the sentence, and he nearly hit himself on the nose with his phone when he went to cover his mouth. From what Eric could see, he looked extremely surprised at his own outburst, and spent a moment blinking away the feeling of raising his voice. With a sigh, he slumped down in his seat and rubbed his face with his free hand. “Sorry, I’m just—I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright.” He let a few moments of silence pass between them, the only sound being the click-clack of Michael’s phone opening and closing. “You could always call ahead, first.”

He felt more than saw Michael blinking owlishly at him for a second, surfacing from the depths of his thoughts. It took approximately three solid seconds for the wheels to start turning again.

“Call—Right. To let them know we’re heading that way.” Michael frowned down at his phone again. “I should have done _that_ sooner, too.”

“I just thought it might be easier on you if you talk to the family first, and take the rest of the ride to think.” He gave a firm nod at nothing in particular. He was already using more emotional muscles than normal and he didn’t like it. “Have your professional face on, you know?”

Michael pursed his lips and nodded stiffly. He glanced at the clock and started doing the math for the time difference before he remembered that was entirely unnecessary. He sighed, then pulled in a deep breath to force himself into his ‘talking on the phone’ voice. Just a quick phone call to give a heads up, maybe some nudging to get permission to investigate the house, and then done. Then he could check his messages and go back to feeling like he could have done better, until they got there and could do some good to make up for it. That was, he supposed, unfair to himself. Didn’t make much difference to know it, though.

* * *

The line only rang once before someone picked up.

“May house. June speaking. Who is this?” The voice sounded very young, very tired, and at least a little annoyed. Michael’s chest hurt; he could only imagine what it was like for the boy.

“Yes, hello—this is Michael Shelley, from the—”

“Magnus Institute, London?”

“Yes, the very one. I was calling to—”

“April… is not here.” Both ends of the call were quiet for a second. Michael could certainly see the resemblance in the phone manners, at the very least. He then instantly felt bad about having that thought and tried to continue. June, once more, cut him off. “They said you were looking for something that would help. Did you find it?”

To say he deflated in his seat would have been being much too kind about things. He found his words about the time June sighed, and the sound of wood thumping against tile started up. It had a rhythm to it, and he assumed it was June’s version of the nervous tapping he’d heard April do.

“No, I’m… I’m sorry.” Honestly, Michael wasn’t sure what reaction that would get. He half expected the phone to be slammed down on the cradle, or yelling. Maybe it would have been easier to process yelling, and not the wet bark of something he realized belatedly was laughter. The thumping petered out, replaced with what Michael recognized as someone wiping their face without missing the phone.

“ _Of course._ ” June’s voice was rougher now, and his breathing was audible. It didn’t have the same edge as when April had told him to answer their questions, but he could still hear the shape of the tone underneath it. Flat, blunt force in a voice—June’s was just being eroded a bit by emotion. Michael was about to offer more apology—not that he could ever offer enough, really—when June laughed. It was mostly a sob, but he recovered it. “Figures. Of course you have _nothing_. No one has a single goddamn clue _what happened to my sibling, and no one can fucking help._ Just figures.”

He took the moment June needed to even out his breathing to try and ease the situation, even a little.

“I couldn’t find something to help them, and I should have. I told them what I knew, and I should have known more. I know how it feels, to know someone you care about is gone.” He couldn’t make out what June said in response, and so he continued, picking idly at the edge of his seat belt. “But we do know what took them.”

The energy coming from the other end of the line shifted drastically once his words sunk in. There were still sniffles, but they were being frantically wiped away almost as frequently as June started and stopped saying something. After a few seconds, he had his breathing under control enough to speak.

“What was it?”

Michael took a deep breath and tried to push away the lead weight that seemed to be taking up residence in his stomach. It didn’t matter that his knee jerk response to talking about this was that the other person would call him a liar. All that mattered was that he knew something that might help, finally.

“Are you sure you—”

“ _Tell me what took them._ ” There was an anger under that sentence that took him by surprise. June’s voice was still rough from crying, but the edge under it was suddenly much more defined. His breathing was scratchy through the phone, but Michael could almost imagine the sort of expression he was wearing. It didn’t feel like an expression he’d like to see. He took a breath and let it out through his nose, thinking on his wording.

“It was a door.” He heard a low rumble that he could only assume came from the kid on the line, but it seemed… off. Something in his gut said it was a warning noise, but that surely couldn’t have been it. This was, at his count, a twelve year old boy mourning his sibling. The feeling stuck to the lead weight in his stomach, though, and he didn’t like it. He kept going, if only to get out what he knew. “It’s not always a door, sometimes its a stairway. Sometimes its… its not anything you can see at all.”

At this point he became aware that Eric had pulled over and was staring at him rather intently. From his expression, Michael had no problem figuring out why—just like closure wasn’t ‘what they did’, neither was telling people about all the weird things they’d ever seen. Eric was of a very specific mind about it, and it was one of the sticking points of their work relationship. He felt that you could tell a statement giver anything at all in terms of what they’d run into—ghosts, weird happenings, creatures, cursed books if Emma was to be believed—because they already knew things went bump in the night. Within reason, of course. They were either bought in enough to tell their story, because they hadn’t decided they’d gone crazy, or they’d convinced themselves that they were completely and totally mad already. Either way, they’d be able to—well, _handle it_ wasn’t the words Eric would have used, he’d use some stuffy sentence structure that had made Michael fall asleep during university. Something about adaptability of the mind, and stretching belief enough to process another leap. The _family_ of said statement givers were not under that umbrella of mental elasticity.

Michael, meanwhile, felt that everything would be a lot more manageable if the Institute did more to let people know that they aren’t the only ones in the history of time to experience something supernatural. Academic back and forth was fine—he personally deeply enjoyed his ongoing friendly feud with the Foundation’s head of paranormal phenomenon regarding energy manipulation in spiritual happenings—but there was a sort of implied scientific sterility to it. An assumed working hypothetical, even around real world data, that divorced it from the fact it happened to a _person_. He preferred, honestly, telling someone that they were not alone. That, yes you saw someone walk through a wall, but so have many people and you’re not losing your mind.

They had argued about it many times over their weekly drinks night, that Eric mostly went on to prove to Michael that he did in fact eat at some point. It almost always stalled the conversation until one of them brought up some documentary or another. He supposed he knew why he had that opinion and Eric didn’t, and he didn’t know why Eric had his—but he wasn’t going to just let people suffer with not knowing. There wasn’t a lot of information to share, but slim pickings are better than an empty plate, as it were.

He flashed Eric a flat look as he continued.

“April had tried to send us a statement on it, and it was destroyed on the way. They thought it might have been the door. They told me that it followed them, and I can only imagine it had been hunting them for a while.” At this point he looked back down at his lap, shifting his messenger bag back and forth on his feet. He took another deep breath and let it out slowly. June had, mercifully, gone very quiet though he could still be heard moving around a bit. It sounded like whatever he was thumping before was now being rolled along the tile. Eric had sat back partially against the car door, with a raised eyebrow as he continued. “It wasn’t… They didn’t make it sound like the door was the main problem they were having, though. The last time we spoke, they mentioned the notpeople, do you—”

“Skinbags, yeah I know.” He sounded more defeated now, with tears creeping back into his voice. More sniffling and then a deep breath. The thumping started up again, slowly. “The police said they found the phone off the hook, when they finally made it out. Was that to you?”

“My coworker, yes.”

“What, you didn’t have time to answer?” Michael winced at the tone. He felt he deserved that, even if he probably didn’t. June sighed after the line was quiet for a while. “Sorry, that was… Sorry. It’s just been… it’s been a day. Several of them. In a row.”

Michael made a sympathetic noise and then was hit with a very, very specific realization.

“Wait, June?” At the sound of the boy’s name, Eric sat up abruptly and gave him a _very_ , very pointed look. He didn’t know what he was supposed to get from it, but it made him fidget. That, however, was solidly at the bottom of his priority list.

“That hasn’t changed in the last few seconds, yeah.” He was willing to overlook the level of deadpan, in favor of getting his brain to stop screaming about a very specific fact. “Mm. Sorry.”

“Why are you _home_?”

“Because I live here.” He couldn’t tell if it was meant to be sarcastic or not. “That’s usually why people are home.”

“No, of course, I mean—this is your home phone number. Your home, that was attacked by literal monsters. Why are—are your parents there? Are you safe?” He heard the low noise again, but this time it sounded… exhausted. At this point, Eric restarted the car and pulled off the side of the road. He had yet another carefully blank expression on, but this one was tinted with something Michael would have to think a bit more on to recognize. At the moment, Eric’s face journey was not the priority. “Are you staying somewhere else?”

His answer was a very loud, long, sigh.

“Short answer is that my parents have never seen a horror movie in their lives, apparently.” He could hear June shifting around, the thumping stuttering a bit and then starting back up slower. June’s words, meanwhile, started going faster. “The long answer is yes, I’m _still_ in the house—because my parents think there’s nothing to be afraid of. Dad thinks it was just someone April pissed off, finally following them home about it. Mom thinks April just trashed the house and ran off somewhere. I know it’s not true, and I keep trying to tell them, but they just… they want simple answers. They want to be able to say it’s just people, or it’s April’s fault. They just want to wait for the cops to say they can’t find anything, so they can forget this all happened. So they can forget about April.”

June started sobbing again, laughing through it in a way that made him anxious. Michael had a rather uncomfortable recollection of April’s bitter, manic laughter when he’d asked how things had gotten worse. Eventually it died down, fading into the standard sobbing of a child that had no better response to what was happening to him. While _that_ was calming down, Michael glanced over at Eric and then the speedometer. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but 102 miles per hour was _not it_.

“Christ, Eric, _there is a speed limit--_ ” He cut himself off and tried to push his tone back into the realm of phone conversation and _not_ wondering why his coworker was trying to give him a heart attack. June made a noise that was a strange hybrid between surprise and a hiccup, and Michael tried to recover the whole situation. “I am _so_ sorry, June. I’m in the states with my coworker, and he’s _apparently_ decided to drive like a madman. Is there anywhere else you could stay? Family?”

Michael gave a light swat at Eric’s arm as they proceeded to pass the whole two other cars on the road with them. Eric’s response was to glance his way, huff, and keep driving. To his credit, he did slow down to 90 miles per hour, not that it helped the 60 speed limit.

“Ask where his parents are.” Eric’s tone was almost as flat as his expression, but he also sounded extremely tense. Michael didn’t know what to do with that kind of unease from him of all people, much less the follow up in a softer tone. “Please.”

In the span of conversation, the line had gotten very quiet and Michael suddenly worried that June had hung up. If it weren’t for some very quiet breathing that he almost didn’t catch over the sound of the car, he’d be sure of it.

“June, are you still there?”

There was another beat of silence, broken by sounds of movement on the other end.

“Yeah. Did April say how to kill the skinbags?” June’s voice was extremely quiet now, and the actual words he’d said didn’t help much with the sudden jolt of anxiety that wormed through Michael’s gut. “Did they say if guns work?”

“June, why do you need to know how to—what’s happening?”

Sounds of shuffling and then muffled yelling started to filter through the background of June’s breathing.

“There’s people outside, arguing with dad. At least, I think they’re peo— _oh._ ” A soft hiss came over the line and the yelling got louder. When he spoke next, Michael could almost hear the shudder that went through him. “That one doesn’t have a face.”

Michael almost hit his head sitting upright in the seat, suddenly keenly aware of how badly the situation on the other end could go.

“June, you need to hide. Get under a bed, someplace that’s hard to see into. You need to go _now._ ” He wasn’t sure just when his stomach crawled into his throat, but he was entirely sure that things were about to go from vaguely bad, to very clearly worse. June sounded like he was moving, and the soft hiss remained constant. “June, are you—”

In the next few seconds, several things happened at once. The least pressing of which, was Eric speeding right back up to 100 mph. Next was the yelling becoming clear enough that he could make out no less than four voices, though the words were indistinct. One, a few octaves deeper than the rest, was talking over the others. The last thing that happened was several loud bangs in quick succession, followed by more yelling. The only vaguely reassuring thing to come over the line was June’s squeak of surprise and the hissing slowly receding.

“June?”

“So, um. You said you were in the states?”

“June, are you alright? What happened?” Michael didn’t know if the kid was changing the subject because he was rattled, but he had to know. “Are you safe?”

June sighed heavily, and it sounded like he hit his head against something. This sigh was less exhaustion and more just moving air out because making it into words would be a bit much to ask at the moment. Michael was going to repeat his questions again, just in case, when June took another breath and finally made words work.

“Dad shot one. The—he was just sawdust? Inside? There’s metal, but, but all that came out was sawdust and—” Tears had started creeping back into his voice. He took another deep breath and let it out slowly. “It looked like the others ran off. I think dad’s going to burn it. Mom’s helping.”

“Alright, it’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.” Michael hoped he wasn’t lying again, because that was not a situation he wanted on his hands twice. It took a bit of effort, but eventually his brain landed on something that might ease things, even just a little. “My partner and I aren’t that far away. Do you think it would help if we came and investigated? We have your address, from April.”

“I don’t—I don’t know if my parents…” A pause for sniffling and some sobbing that he seemed to be failing to choke off. The soft hissing returned, but much quieter than before, and June took a deep breath. The static picked up a bit as he exhaled. “I guess my parents can’t say nothing’s happening anymore… I’ll, I’ll talk to them? Do… do you think you’ll be able to help?”

“I think we’ll be able to find something. Some answers.” _Whether you’ll like them or not._ He does not say to the very upset child. “I think we can at least tell your family—”

“I meant April.” Michael bit his lip and tried to pick out shapes through the window. It was starting to get greener, but that just meant he now noticed when a bush or tree whipped past in a blur. He ignored both the speed they were going and the weight of his stomach dropping from his throat back to his gut. June, thankfully, wasn’t aware of this. “Do… do you think they could still be alive?”

“I…” Michael sucked in a breath and forced it out his nose, trying to not make this terrible. “I think anything is possible.”

Another short bark of laughter and the hissing got a bit louder.

“I didn’t ask that.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.” The line was silent for a moment, save for the sound of June shifting around and the light hissing. When he spoke again, he sounded even more exhausted. “I’ll tell my parents you’re coming. Even if they don’t wanna listen to you, it’ll keep dad from shooting you on sight. I think.”

“Thank you.” He meant it, but mostly because he didn’t intend to die on a research trip. Michael pushed the thought away and tried to focus on the normal mundane portion of investigating spooky happenings. “Is there anything else that’s happened, since April was… was taken? More door sightings, the shadow, anything like that?”

June sounded like he was rubbing his face again, but he wasn’t going to hold the various impacts on the phone against him.

“I’ve never seen the door. Or the shadow. April told me about them a lot, but… I don’t think they’re after me.” More sounds of shifting and another sigh. “There is… is there any weird thing you… no, that's probably stupid.”

“June?”

“Is there anything that locks doors? Aside of the door thing.”

Michael’s eyebrows knit together almost painfully while he tried to think. “I… I don’t think so. Why?”

“You’ll see when you get here, I guess. Their door’s been stuck closed since the cops left. Um, how far away _are_ you? I don’t think my parents are going to like you showing up while the bonfire’s still going.”

“We’re going through, uh,” Michael glanced around and tried to catch literally any signs as Eric skipped through a residential area at a bracing 50 miles per hour. “Eric, did you happen to look where we were while you were ignoring the road laws or—”

“If you want me to slow down, we’ll be there in about four hours. Otherwise we’ll be there in two.” He seemed extremely unconcerned about anything that wasn’t a stop sign, traffic light, or crosswalk. Michael made the executive decision that this would be a conversation for after he’d hung up.

“I’d like to live, so slow down, _please._ June, we’ll be there in about four hours. Do you think you can talk your parents around, and get a nap in by then?” He glanced at the clock and pursed his lips. It would put them there about five in the evening, not a great time to turn up at someone’s door—but it’s not like spooky kept regular people hours. He could hear June counting out the time as well, and then humming in thought.

“I think I can do one of those things and then pretend to do the other until you show up.” A pause and then a gag. “Okay, smoke just started wafting in. God that _reeks_. I’ll talk to my parents, don’t die and if your partner kills anyone with shitty driving, I promise to figure out how to reverse haunt someone.”

“O-okay?”

“Right, bye.”

Michael blinked as the line went dead, pulling the phone away and honestly wondering if phone manners were just not taught over here. Possible, but he didn’t know if he could really hold it against the kid. What he _could_ hold against people was Eric’s sudden decision to become Mario Andretti.

“Eric.”

“Michael.”

“This is a Toyota, not a rally car.”

“Hm.”

* * *

The good news of the night was that, even going the speed limit—which Eric did under a level of pressure Michael frankly didn’t expect to have to exert when he woke up this morning—the remainder of the trip took just short of three hours. This gave Michael plenty of time to listen to his voice mail and stare blankly out the window before putting himself back together. The bad news was that they were in rural Washington during late April, and the last hour of the trip was spent trying to make it through rain and winds that seemed entirely determined to throw the vehicle off the highway. Eric, thankfully, was much better at picking out road signs in the rain than Michael gave him credit for and they pulled into the trailer park with little difficulty. Finding the right house was, at first, a problem—the numbers that marked spaces were far smaller than road signs, and were often on the houses themselves or too sun-bleached to make out. He was about to claim old age and send Michael out to knock on doors and ask about it, when he noticed the fire.

Directly in the middle of one of the driveways was a roaring bonfire, being attended to by several people, only one of which had an umbrella. The one holding an umbrella started toward them as they pulled to a stop by the road. Eric killed the engine and fidgeted, pondering their next move. Michael had summed up the situation as ‘June is going to try to make his dad not shoot us’, which Eric felt was an assumed step, given this was America. Michael was more interested in noting the splintered front door, and the plastic-covered broken windows before the rain made everything outside the car into a blur. The figure holding the umbrella stopped a good ten feet back and waved cautiously. Eric opted to be the brave party, because he still had an internal itch about this, and Michael was likely to be much too friendly and weird everyone out. He popped open the door and stood up, frowning a bit because he did _not_ plan torrential rain into his shoe choices.

“Is this the May house?” The boy with the umbrella—and it was just a _boy_ , he decided, going entirely by how round his face was—frowned at that. He was edging six feet, but he most certainly had not matured into that height yet. He didn’t have a face that fit with frowning, or the dark lines under his eyes. What he did have was a very piercing look as he looked Eric up and down. The look didn’t falter when glancing from him, to Michael who seemed to be going through the five stages of grief about what the rain was going to do to his hair. “Well?”

“You don’t sound like Mr. Shelley.” Eric was suddenly deeply uncomfortable. June might not be the height of what he assumed a twelve year old would be, but he most certainly sounded like it. Things involving children never sat particularly well with him. The fears never cared too much about how old their victims were, and while that was probably partially the point, it was still hard to process most of the time. “Who are you?”

Points for skepticism.

“Eric Delano, and unfortunately, I work for the Magnus Institute. You’re June, I take it?” At this point Michael rolled down the window so he didn’t have to get out directly into the rain until the very last second. Eric appreciated the fact that June took a step back at that, instead of staying where he was. “Shelley’s down there.”

“June? Hi.” The look on Michael’s face must have been _something_ because June seemed to be doing some very intense mental math the second it happened. “I’m Michael. We talked on the phone?”

The mental math look dropped into a particularly flat expression toward the end.

“Yeah, I heard Mr. Delano when he said _words_.”

Eric could feel Michael going red from there, and decided to just go to that side of the car and get this whole thing over with. Thankfully, June had chosen to stand on the few bits of dry land and he could hope his loafers drained. Unfortunately, this also meant he had a better look at him, and it made his neck itch.

“So.” It felt even worse when they were standing next to each other. June was watching them both as Michael got out of the car, but it wasn’t terribly hard—all players considered—to read the expression of careful optimism. Eric also felt that it was less actual ‘everything will be okay’ optimism, and more his speed of it. Which was to say, a terribly sad thing to see on a child’s face. “Didn’t think one notperson would warrant a bonfire.”

June shrugged, opting to ignore Michael after the blond half squeaked in surprise from putting his foot in a puddle.

“He got more than that one, I guess.” He looked queasy for a moment and shook it off, shaggy brown hair flinging rainwater. The umbrella must have been a newer addition, Eric supposed. “The… the skin’s all burned off now, though. It should just be wood.”

“Did you talk to them?” Michael looked like a drowned cat with barely any water on him. “They aren’t going to be surprised by us popping in?”

“Well, gee, Mr. Shelley, I don’t think the _monsters_ can be surprised right now. But I can sure stick my head in the fire and find out.” Eric could appreciate the deadpan, but he felt that possible threat of Michael’s death was a bit more important. June seemed aware of this as well, and looked properly abashed about it the second he finished the sentence. “…Sorry. I’m just—sorry. I told them you were coming, but they… well, its… you’ll see. Just… just don’t argue with them and it’ll be fine. C’mon.”

Eric followed his gesture behind him, toward the other two people in the driveway.

He had not, previous to that moment, considered what kind of people raised someone like April May. If he was pressed, Eric would have said they were probably inattentive, but generally present. He did not, at any point, imagine either the woman bustling around the bonfire with a pitchfork, or the extremely large man sitting on the front porch with a shotgun. Or said man having his feet propped up on an ammunition box, or the woman flipping bodies over the coals with ease. Actually, he wasn’t entirely sure what he would have assumed they’d be like. What he did know, is if they were him, he wouldn’t have let his son trot up to a strange car a few short hours after their home was invaded for the second time that week. To his credit, he did manage to tuck that thought into a small box in his head for later when he needed extra reasons to be angry at the world. The two of them quietly watched June lead them closer, though only one of them moved to greet them.

“These the magnet people, June?” He would have snorted about it, if it weren’t for how stiff June’s shoulders got at her tone.

“Magnus, mom. This is Mr. Delano, and Mr. Shelley—He’s the one April talked to. They’re here to—” June was half way through forming another sentence when his mother waved him off with a frown. He immediately looked down. “...Sorry.”

Eric returned to as blank an expression as he could manage as he watched her face shift from annoyed to a bright, friendly smile that would have passed for genuine had he not seen her put it on. She held out her hand, first to him, and then to Michael. They shook it, though mostly to be polite.

“Carla, nice to meet you.” She paused and gave the bonfire a particularly bitter look, smile still in place. It almost reached her eyes when she looked back. “Wish it was under better circumstances.”

“I think we’d all wish that, ma’am.” Michael was very natural at the whole customer service voice. He was not.

“So, how many did you have to kill?” He hadn’t meant it to come across as flatly as it had. He’d been aiming more for coolly conversational, at the very least. Ah, well. The change in her demeanor was immediate as it was drastic. Not that it got her talking any, though. “The notpeople? How many were there?”

“Right. Those.” She looked into the bonfire again, mouth drawn into a thin line. Michael was clearly trying to ignore the people-like outlines twitching in the orange, and the hissing of when rain made its way between visible flame and wood. Eric, meanwhile, was mentally logging the fact that—according to April—their family couldn’t see through the notpeople’s disguises. In his experience, the stranger didn’t let people know things unless it’s cover had been pried up kicking and screaming. Even then, that didn’t help the people around the person doing the prying. June he could understand seeing through it—informed ability over personal—but either April had been mistaken about their parents believing them about it, or… Nope, that was a thought he didn’t want to sit with. “We thought they were… well, they’re not people, like you said.”

Well, _now_ he had to sit with it. He was even content to put it in the ‘waking nightmares I have been aware of’ box, but apparently Michael still didn’t have that ability.

“You—did you think they were people?”

The good news was that Carla looked scandalized, and the bad news was that June looked like he was about ready to sink into the mud for the rest of eternity.

“At first! But—but after one threatened—” She seemed at a bit of a loss for words. Eric momentarily thanked a god he didn’t believe in for the fact she hadn’t doubled back on the ‘at first’, and that Michael had settled for looking appropriately horrified. She took a deep breath and drew up to her full 5’5” of height to stare them down. “They threatened my family, so we defended ourselves. Now, June assured us that you had _something_ important to say, so get on with it. What are those things?”

“They’re exactly what April said they were.” Again, he hadn’t _meant_ to be confrontational, but he supposed that was just where his voice was going to be for the whole visit. This seemed to be the wrong thing to say, because once again Carla was sputtering and looking increasingly displeased. Eventually she cut herself off with a huff and shot a look over to the porch, where June’s father sat. Eric chose to ignore the amount of fury in the look she shot June the second he was mostly looking away. He nodded at the man on the porch.“Mr. May, I presume.”

“Call me Walter.” Walter May’s voice was not what someone could call easy to listen to. It was rough, the cigarette he was smoking and the full ashtray next to him giving plenty of reason why for at least part of it. It was also almost entirely even, barring the slight catch in breathing. Not unnaturally, no it was the sort of evenness that only a complete and total lack of interest could achieve. Voice aside, he was unsettling to look at. He wore all black, or a very dark blue, and had his forearms exposed showing a mural of tattoos. The ones that stood out past the thick, dark hair on his arms were only mildly unnerving. He also had spiderwebs on both elbows, but Eric couldn’t pick out anything crawling on him so it was probably a coincidence. He didn’t have the darting look to his eyes that Web aligned people tended to carry, allowing him to slot that aside. Even at the short distance they were at, however, Walter’s eyes were hard to make out. They were shaded by heavy brows and half-lidded eyes, making it difficult to note, not that it was hard to tell where he was looking. It felt, as Eric felt him look him over, very much like he was being broken down into sections. Weak spots, strong points, vulnerable angles. Checking for anatomical inconsistency, almost. He disliked it almost as much as he disliked the leisurely way Walter ashed his cigarette. People thrown into situations like this, they didn’t tend to do much that could be described as leisurely. For all the world Walter May seemed totally comfortable in the situation he found himself in and that made Eric’s shoulders itch. “You the fuckers that made my phone bill go up so high?”

“W… what?” Eric couldn’t fault Michael for that one, honestly. “We talked to April, yes—”

Walter seemed not to be paying attention to him.

“My boy tells me there was something to all the bullshit my daughter was telling you. Alright, I’ll play Tales from the Crypt.” He took a final pull off his cigarette and lit another. Michael was doing his best to find someway to be polite about all this, and he was failing. Thankfully Eric and Walter seemed around the same level of age induced crust and gristle, which would make this a lot easier. “Tell me about those things.”

“April said they tried to tell you, several times.” He tilted his head, doing his best to ignore the drops sticking to his glasses. “I’m not quite sure how much you know already.”

“She also tell you that she wasn’t in the loony bin entirely because people like us here? Or did she leave that out in favor of more bullshit about a magic door making things sound funny?”

“ _They_ told us that things full of sawdust, wearing human skin, were after them. Those and the wooden ones. Had been for a while, and it seems it’s finally come to a head.” He paused, deeply disliking how much Walter was looking at his face. He’d gotten a bit too used to Michael’s habit of looking _around_ his face, he supposed. It felt slimy in a way he couldn’t describe. “The door’s what finally took them.”

Walter hummed and he wasn’t sure how the low rumbling noise carried over the rain, but it did. He gestured for them to come up onto the porch, and sat back in his chair. After they’d done so, June huddling on the steps to give them room, they were treated to Walter blowing smoke at them. June seemed used to it, blinking away the irritation tears in his eyes, as Michael started coughing.

“Alright, Crypt Keeper and his boy wonder,” He tilted his head back, returning to looking rather unimpressed. “Tell me what broke into my house.”

“Again, things wearing human skin.” Eric crossed his arms and quirked an eyebrow. It took a lot to remain civil, but he didn’t think it would be good for anyone around Walter to tell him to pull his head out of his ass and listen. So, instead he put on his best ‘professor with tenure and without coffee’ voice. “It’s weird, but not that complicated. The door is a separate, also strange, creature. Both feed off of people knowing something isn’t quite right. They’d been targeting April for several years, apparently. They were perceptive enough to see through the disguises, and grounded enough to not let the door get to them until it surprised them, I assume. They outlasted most I’ve ever seen these things go after.”

Walter lit another cigarette and dropped the last one in the tray. He hummed while taking a pull. Michael meanwhile alternated between glancing at Eric in confusion and fidgeting with his bag.

“Real fountain of knowledge, huh?”

“Michael here handled their case.” Eric gestured and Michael nodded. He then promptly went very still when Walter turned to picking _him_ apart instead. “I’m here for seniority reasons. We don’t do solo investigations, on the off chance Bigfoot decides to eat an intern, you understand.”

Michael managed to look even more confused, while Eric kept neutral, and Walter seemed deeply amused.

“Can’t let the new blood make you look bad, huh?” Eric wasn’t surprised by the number of yellowed teeth Walter flashed him.

“Looks bad on the yearly review if we let too many get eaten.”

“Yeah, that’d take off some of the Christmas bonus. So, my boy says you want to look around, see if you can find something new?” He waited for them to nod, and blew more smoke in their direction. “Do you think something here’ll tell us if she’s dead or not?”

“If we can find any evidence that they’re still alive, we’ll do everything we can—” Michael was swiftly waved off with all the concern one might show a horse fly landing on him. That is to say, with a very casual hostility that didn’t require direct attention.

“Just root around and tell me if I need to buy a headstone, or if Elvira pops out of a cupboard.” He sounded casually done with the conversation, like he was telling them not to worry about weeding a flowerbed. The most invested he seemed in the sentence was when he spat out the word ‘buy’, putting the idea of expense higher than the idea of finding his child. Carla remained silent through the whole of it, though her expression tightened at it. Eric did his best to _silently_ grind his teeth. Michael next to him was alternating between imitating a fish out of water, and looking at him wide eyed. Eric hoped he’d be able to keep quiet until after the investigation. Walter, unaware of this wave of internal reaction, snuffed his latest cigarette and snapped at June. “Walk ‘em through the house. Anything goes missing, it’s _your_ ass.”

“Yes, sir.” June nodded stiffly and started toward the front door. “This way.”

Michael’s mouth popped open and closed a few times, before he stared at Eric for confirmation that he had in fact heard the last few minutes. He used the vast majority of his self control to nudge Michael toward the door as June more or less power-walked ahead of them. Once the door was closed behind them, June’s whole demeanor shifted—muscles relaxing and expression mellowing. Michael rounded on June with a completely lost expression that Eric was making himself ignore in favor of finishing what they were doing before he lost his mind.

“June, I am so—”

“April’s room is this way.” June was off before Michael could finish the sentence and looked to Eric like _he_ had any answers. The most Eric could do was put a hand on his shoulder and shake his head. Michael’s eyebrows shot up and he glanced between the door and where June was standing, half way through the kitchen. Eric shook his head again and frowned. Michael dropped his voice and gave him a look.

“What?”

“It’ll just come back on him. Just drop it.”

“We should still say—”

“Trust me, he’s probably painfully aware that okay isn’t in the description.” He squeezed Michael’s shoulder lightly. “Trust me.”

“Fine, but I don’t like it.”

“We don’t _have_ to like it, we just need to do our job.” Eric grimaced and shook himself out a bit. “God I hate that I had to say that.”

Across the room, June cleared his throat.

“If you guys are done, I found something weird.” June seemed entirely nonplussed by their not-really-hushed conversation they’d been having behind him. He was also staring very intently at a door at the end of the hallway leading off from the kitchen. The two joined him and followed where he was pointing. At the end sat three doors—one open to a bathroom, one open with several posters of trains visible, and one open just a crack between the two. “Their door’s open.”

“You said something had been keeping it closed, right?” Michael chewed at his lip and leaned a bit to get a look inside from where they were standing almost ten feet away. Most of what he could see through the gap was a bookshelf, with a few stuffed animals on top. Oddly patterned black and white wallpaper behind that. Nothing fantastically off putting, but there could also be—he didn’t know, maybe a giant shadow creature waiting to eat them. It _had_ been markedly absent from any of April’s voicemails, so it was possible. Though it could also just be the door again. “June, what’s usually in their room?”

“What do you—Ah.” He caught on mid-sentence, furrowing his eyebrows in thought. “That, from here.”

“Eric?”

“Hm. Don’t think it was the door.” He pointed higher and to the very corner of the doorway, and frowned. Hanging there was a clump of thick, drying spiderweb that flicked back and forth in the breeze of the poorly covered bedroom windows. He tilted his head and moved forward to inspect the door, careful not to actually touch anything. The hinges were caked with web, and he had the sinking feeling that the other side of the door was probably covered in much more of it. He sighed through his nose and flexed his fingers “Never liked spiders. Well, no time like the present.”

With that he pushed open the door gently with his fingertips, careful to lean back on the off chance something jumped out. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected—the whole place done in web, a shadow lurking under the bed ready to go for his ankles, or maybe the whole place caked with fractals. Instead, he found himself looking at what would generally be considered a normally appointed room that could belong to a teenager. Well, if the teenager had put themselves through a hurricane and wrote the whole ordeal on every surface they could reach. There was an overwhelming smell of the permanent marker he assumed April had used to write across their room. He recognized some sentences he could see as from their statement on the door, sloppy handwriting committing it to a more permanent medium than paper. There wasn’t much room once he stepped inside, though there was enough to check the back of the door and grimace at the web there as well.

“Well, good news is I might not have to finish putting together that statement. Bad news is that it’s time to put that transcribing talent of yours to use, Michael. Your wrist is going to hate working for the archive almost as much as I do.” Eric scanned the room as Michael tried to look around him—fallen crafts projects, the vanity mirror propped against the front of the piece to allow access to the wall behind, and their desk also covered in thick strands of web. It clung to the fiber crafts, mostly, connecting the crochet section of the desk to the footboard of the bed. The drawer at the front was crisscross with thick bands of fiber, but the chair sat before it was entirely clean. He sighed, pondering how much of a job it was going to be to pry it open. “Jesus, not the mess I expected, but at least it doesn’t look deadly. Get started on the walls, would you? I’ll try my luck with the desk. Maybe they left notes.”

Michael took exactly three and a half steps into the room before he noticed something directly over Eric’s head.

“Wh—oh, Christ. Eric—Eric look up.” He nearly chewed through his lower lip before swapping to a knuckle. “June, stay out there.”

On the wall, carved deep into the drywall were a series of words filled with red and smudged around the edges.

_THEY WERE NOT BRAVE_

“Well, shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> June is Coping and Michael is Doing His Best. Eric, reluctantly, is as well.   
> Also the distortion is a prick


	7. I27: Reality in Invisible Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Its an early chapter if i post it before thursday. Here we go yall, plot in motion.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter include: Unreality, descriptions of unreality, the Distortion's whole deal, memory issues, April's anger issues, harm to said April, noncanon typical worm like things.

Time is hard, in the hallways.

It was hard outside of them, too, April supposed.

It was, after all, an ephemeral concept that enough people believed in that it became a fact. All in the name of understanding the universe as they saw it, and calling that interpretation impartial. A thing who’s interpretation can and cannot possibly be impartially correct within the _individual_ , but was still codified based on the collective. As if the concept of time wasn’t simply the product of some creatures on a rock in space, hurtling through the universe, ascribing meaning to nothing and calling it reality. Beings managing to contextualize, and exist in spite of everything. Many things existed in spite of everything. Plants growing through sidewalks, wild animals in cities, pigeons, most types of bees.

They, too, tended to stick around in spite of the worlds best continued efforts. A regular cockroach, really.Less the real kind you could kill with the proper application of poison, or a shoe, and more the cartoon kind that only died because it encountered something more stubborn—like old fruit cake. This sort of encounter generally happened not when it made narrative sense, but because someone thought it would be funny at the time. Like Tom and Jerry meets some horror movie, really, but they weren’t a named character. You don’t name a cockroach in those things. They live, they survive to build the joke, and then they die to finish the punchline.

April shook themselves off that line of thinking by tugging on their lower lip and wincing as the pain pushed both the thoughts and the brain fuzz away. The point was that they continued in spite of opposition, and they would keep doing so because _fuck what wanted them dead_.

Unfortunately, centering back in on themselves right then meant remembering where they were and how absolutely out of their skull bored they were. April wondered if it was strange to view it that way, but that is precisely what they saw around them—some creature that was a door that lead to a hallway, that lead to unending beige and gray. Logically, they shouldn’t be bored, they should be terribly unsettled. They were, in some deep fuzzy part of their brain, extremely unnerved. But they couldn’t at that point feel that part, and it was maddening because they _knew_ they couldn’t feel it.

To redirect their own attention and not lose their few remaining marbles, they kicked the closest mirror to them and hissed. While they might have forgotten, their ankle was entirely aware that Homer had stomped on it. Shards of the mirror fell away to reveal a yawning black void that they regarded with no small amount of annoyance. It was not a swirling film on reality, and it was not consuming light. It was simply a boring hole, dark only because it hadn’t rendered itself in yet. Sighing, they shimmied through to an identical hallway and tried to keep thinking good thoughts—it didn’t help, really, but it felt better to lose themselves on a high note.

On the list of positives about themselves, they could securely put ‘very hard to kill’. This was, after all, largely a good thing. If they were still alive, they could learn new things, pet more cats, spend time with their little brother, and maybe read a book. Possibly even a good one. It also stapled a large glossy Polaroid of a middle finger on the world in their enemies directions, and they were good with that, too. The list after that was largely variations of ‘can move while in pain’ and ‘can read really fast when focused’. Good with cats and dogs. Short, but existent—both the list and themselves.

They supposed they could compile the other side of the list, but that felt unproductive. What did feel productive was reminding themselves of what was fact and what was assumed to be, for grounding purposes. An immutable truth balanced with the acknowledgment that some truths are in fact not. They were in fact themselves, no matter how much better off everything might be otherwise. Their thoughts, though full of cotton and blurred at the edges, were theirs. What was not certain, especially not here, was time and actual perception.

They wondered, idly, when they started up this line of thought.

Time being what it is, they could well have not decided to yet. Or, perhaps it was when they entered this place. The only thing they knew for certain was that they had started, and the finish line was the exit. Like the Odyssey robbed of an overarching plot, the world stringing them along until something happened. Were they Odysseus, pulled far from home because of a war—though not one they had a stake in? No, not a war, a war was too large and terrible for their meager trench of violence and misery. Were they a side character putting more importance on themselves to feel better as their story unfolded? A member of his crew, convinced they knew better simply because their eyes or stomach told them so?

Or, they thought as they trudged along, blinking away the occasional looming shapes at the corner of their vision, they weren’t that high up on the ladder.

Not important enough to have self importance, but useful enough to play a role. Not important enough to be mourned by the heroes of the tale, just a passing appearance. Perhaps they were Demodocus, blind and singing their story to those that would listen—and being used for their basic purpose alone, before disappearing from the story.

More apt, they supposed as they pushed through yet another painting, would be to call themselves Cassandra, sans Apollo. Granted, that implied a lot of terrible things about their future, but they supposed that was the point life seemed keen on making about them. Maybe. It mostly came down to who or _what_ would be Apollo in that situation in the first place and who would be—nope, they were not continuing that line of thought because that made things even _worse_.

They were, they thought bitterly, probably more along the lines of someone who tripped over the wrong tree and got cursed because Hera had stubbed her toe earlier that day. Just a blip on the screen of something bigger that made the wrong choice, at the wrong time, and angered the wrong thing. Then, of course, who was Hera? What gallivanting Zeus angered her into stomping around Olympus, and then earth to rain her rage at a simple tree? And by extension, all who would touch upon it until her anger cooled? Perhaps, instead, there were no gods and simply devils—not sent to harm them specifically, but perfectly willing to glut themselves on their misery.

It was funny, in a certain way, that they were waxing poetic while stumbling about. It felt very pretentious, and they weren’t entirely sure if it was wrong of them to go down that rabbit hole when they had, ostensibly, larger things to worry about. Not that they could remember what that _was_ a vast majority of the time. Or that time was real, or used to be. _Or_ that they had not always been wandering these dreary repeating halls on tired feet and with sagging eyes that found no rest. A wandering mind, not sharpened by the whetstone of sleep would skip on the skin of reality. Skipping, slicing into the wrong thing and making the whole thing incomprehensible all over again. It was dangerous to wander too far, when it was not your feet doing the wandering. Here in the… where was there? Or here? And was the end of the hallway really an end if there was a turn?

Their mind heaped question upon question and made mountains while pondering the molehills. It felt quite like forgetting the mountain was there, really. That said, what harm really _was_ there in pondering molehills while climbing mountains? So long as they didn’t forget they were on a mountain in the first place, it was _probably_ fine. Changes in altitude probably made things better or worse—they couldn’t say, because they didn’t know if they could ever have said—but so long as they didn’t get light headed and trip, so long as they didn’t commit the sin of letting their mind wander, they would be fine. What was a little mental altitude sickness when it was all that was reminding you that you were you, and that you exist in any meaningful way?

They paused to stare into a photograph of a wide open field, and wondered if it helped them somehow to ponder the ephemeral with abstractions and avoid the physical. The grass in the field was both rigid and fluid, waving in wind that could not be. Did they prefer how concepts interacted with reality, over how their muscles ached and their head pounded? Dusty recollections of words in books, over the scratch in their lungs as they moved. Feelings of nostalgia, the taste of tripping words, over the feelings of vertigo as their stomach lurched along with tripping feet. Yes, they decided as they managed to tear their gaze away from the field before it fully bled into the sky, that was probably it. They had just forgotten about starting the thought.

Thought was not a physical thing they could check on as easily as blood clotting on their knuckles, or their lungs finally letting them breathe again. It wasn’t a meaty thing, easy to put between their teeth and chew, to work their bloody gums open again on it’s edges and to be _awake_. Thought was a single stream of liquid clarity, untainted by warped perception in the twisting desert of corridors. Around the edges, yes, grew blurry things that numbed them to touch, but they were not trying to stay on the edges. Their train of thought, when they could catch it, was solidly on a track straight down the middle. It was _hard,_ and it took _work,_ and that made it extremely valuable in this place.

Hard, physical description and concise terms that went with them, could mean things. Physical meaning could then be interpreted, and in fact needed to be for perception to be done. Perception, and the interpretation thereof, could be _wrong_. Tainted and twisted by the simple fact that they were observed—often, _easily_. So easy was it to not notice something, and even easier to notice and not _understand_.

Outside, in the place they couldn’t recall the realness of, it was just a problem of perspective. Of not having all the _information_ as you noticed something happening. A completely innocent, or at the very least, neutral misunderstanding of reality.It didn’t always need an evil hallway dressed up like a low budget Shining knock-off, but they presumed that it certainly didn’t hurt.

Outside it was something you might miss on first glance, that you can reconcile later. Maybe you didn’t notice a sliding glass door and walked into it. Maybe you didn’t see someone walking toward you and realize they existed about the time you run into them and they make noise. Regardless, you perceive the other actor in the situation. You intuit that they are real, that the situation is real, and further you respond accordingly.

Inside the hallways, this got tricky because tricky was the only thing things could be. If everything was tricky, what was easy? What did easy mean, really, if everything was hard? What—they shook this off mostly through punching a particularly liquid snapshot of a flower. Pain radiated from their fist backwards, starting at their shoulder and moving down. This was wrong and it _annoyed_ them, the prickle of the feeling drawing them back in. The image ran out over the frame as they moved on, the glass having melted into glue.

There didn’t seem to be other people—or, if there were, they had forgotten them as rapidly as they had noticed—and this left no other actor to reference from. Sounds they could check using their usual methods, though snapping hurt their wrist in a way they couldn’t decide the feeling of. Visual anomalies were harder, in much the same way knowing up from down in the hallways was harder. Sounds with no source are a one and done check—look around while making a closer noise. The perception might be wrong, might be so entirely incorrect that it meant nothing—but it was familiar, and so it became a shield. They were no stranger to hearing what should not have been heard, and seeing what should not exist. Sometimes, they half remembered, they’d been able to tell if it was happening. Now, reality was strange, familiar in its unfamiliarity. Checking wasn’t for reality anymore, not really. It was for the benefit of knowing that their actions at least were still theirs. So long as they could do that, they could continue.

That is, until they had to touch things. Trust was never entirely their strong suit, even when they could trust half of what they saw and a quarter of what they heard. There was no real check for physical changes that wasn’t touching—and touching usually left them entirely uncomfortable in a way they wouldn’t have been able to describe even outside this place.

Seeing something heave up out of the carpet and sit, quivering before them with no indication of removing itself—not something they could avoid touching. Yes, they supposed they could turn around, but they’d just find themselves back in the same place. Somehow closer to the shuddering mass of fiber that writhed like larva. Every backtrack would drag them closer until they had to lay hands on it, and remembered how to vomit in a queasy flash of liquid reminder. And so they would bite back the nothing in their stomach—did they come in empty, or had this happened before—and sink their hands to the wrists in the soft-bodied static of the carpet. Feeling was a lie, but they almost believed the sharp sparks through their clothes as they hauled themselves up and over—only to slam down into the carpet when the mass inevitably collapsed underneath them. They would then stand up and continue; they had no other option.

Catching the vases of plants they didn’t know the names of, flickering back and forth in fifty foot intervals, between things they were and things they were not. Were they clear cut crystal, cradling carnations? Or was it a beating heart, palpating wetly around some peonies? This, they did not test by touch. Partially because they could reasonably avoid it—when being reasonable was an option—and partially because in their moments of clarity they didn’t like the idea of covering their hands in eternally gooey muscle fibers and only noticing every now and then. Revulsion, thankfully, seemed to be a sensation that retained its potency.

They were usually robbed of this luxury every few dozen hallways, when they would come back to themselves long enough to stop moving. The hallways did not _like_ it when they stopped moving for long periods, and seemed to respond to it… violently. Floors that felt like screaming as they heaved up in waves under April’s feet, to fling them onward. Walls that pressed into them so hard they could taste upside-down music as they were forced up and through another carpet. Once, they were hit in the back of the head by a falling picture frame. It housed a drawing of fractals in ballpoint pen, and smelled of blood. Occasionally, they would remember seeing something move in the frame, but that was hard to do and they had other things to remember.

Important things, like their little brother, nice cats, and the fact they wanted to spin kick the door so hard it snapped into a thousand pieces.

It was nice, arriving back at a line of thought they’d lost in the fog. Gave them a feeling of nostalgia for when they could at least half trust what their senses said. It felt like they were winning, just a little bit.

Granted, that thought was instantly followed by a fog of cotton packing in around their brain stem.

Another swift kick to a mirror—no void this time, sadly—and the feeling was gone in favor of their ankle _deeply_ wishing they had a better plan. They supposed they could yank at their face more, but that aggravated their jaw. Rolling their shoulders could work, but the muscles at the back of their neck were threatening to kick up a migraine and they devoutly didn’t want _that_ mess on top of everything else. Sure, it would hurt enough to keep the cotton away, but it came with a peanut butter replacement. If the peanut butter was made of knives and the knives were at a rave. So, no to that, too. Their ribs had stopped throbbing a while ago, so just moving wasn’t doing it either—though it was occasionally interesting to see the pain turn into flashing lights. A feeling of familiarity tickled in the back of their brain when they tried to determine why they landed on kicking things in the first place.

Oh, right, because _fuck_ this door and its shitty taste in decorating.

With a whole one mystery solved, they returned to wandering and pondering.

* * *

There are, depending on the publication, one thousand and seventy one words in Edgar Allen Poe’s _The Raven_ , which was published in 1845. It was, if taken entirely literally, a poem about a man in mourning being harassed by a raven that probably just wanted a snack and had learned some English. Many words, by many people far more educated than April would ever be, had been said about the figurative meaning. However, this did not deter them from forging into what they could remember and shoving the red-hot iron of extrapolation against the ever-growing fog in their head.

For example, they thought as they knocked over a plant for no reason other than petulance, they too had an extremely bad habit of asking questions they don’t strictly need the answers to.

Generally speaking, they didn’t _need_ to have stared over their bedside at a living shadow and probably locked themselves into dealing with it until they were dead. They hadn’t needed to get involved with Homer, and really, they could probably have gone their whole life minding their own business. They most certainly didn’t need to have spent so many sleepless nights glaring at the door and imagining that it felt like battery acid. And, like the narrator Poe had supposed, they also spent quite a while pondering things instead of doing something about them—and then promptly pissed themselves off at their own questions because answers wouldn’t, _couldn’t_ come. It was a momentary joy in the very question existing, and then the consequences of the asking. That said, like the raven speaking Nevermore, life likewise had offered them no answers. Well, not strictly—it had an answer. A single one, that echoed like the raven itself.

_There was never any safety._

Granted, their insight was delivered by dread, violence, and disorder—not a raven that could be said to have haunted the narrator for the rest of his days. There was despair there, true, and the idea that there was never any hope cropped up several times. They pushed this away, firmly, because at the very least there was _comfort_. Certainly there were moments when nothing was going wrong in their life, where for the briefest moment they knew joy and peace. Rarer than all that, yes, but present.

April supposed that was a romantic take on the gothic theme, and tried to round back into a much more concrete track.

They tried to remember how many lines and how many stanzas were in the poem and groaned as they hit static. Well, static if someone had very quickly and carefully painted along their ability to count in their head with the sort of brain fuzz that came with being dizzy. Quite frankly it made their teeth itch, and they hated it.

Thinking as logically as they could at the moment, it was probably to do with how they counted in general. Their memory wasn’t wonderful at the best of times, and they tended to count groups of five or ten on their fingers. This meant the internalized ephemeral idea of thought and numbers was suddenly tied to the very physical and perceivable. It helped, a bit, to force the mental image alongside the lines in their head, but it rapidly fell apart. They weren’t sure if that was on their inability to focus enough to have a static hand in their head while counting lines, or if their brain had just decided to mirror and distort the lines in their head just for giggles. Either way, they were blaming the door. They had blamed a lot on the door, really.

It helped, focusing blame on how they got there. They couldn’t remember exactly when the door closed behind them—that was an observation of the sound, the temperature going from cool spring air to stuffy and dry—but they remembered the feeling of their gut dropping through their shoes. They assumed that and the sound happened at the same time, though with how everything worked it could well have been them breathing hard. That didn’t really matter either. What mattered was the mental image of the door and the fact emotions helped to keep them centered as much as pain did.

The specifics of _that_ thought started fading a bit, and they punched a photograph to focus. The glass in the picture frame flaked around their knuckles, grinding itself into sand. Their frustration, with both their situation and their brain, was incalculable.

The physical and interpretation of such was not trustworthy. The only thing that they could trust was the internal. The physical was not—they groaned as their jaw popped from grinding their teeth. They promptly gagged when the taste of blood took a hard shift into tasting like bleach. On reflex, they spit and then frowned at the neon green shade their blood turned on the carpet. This, they reminded themselves, was a lie. It was observable and was not trustworthy. It certainly didn’t help that their go to way of thinking through things involved motion, linking thought and interpretation in an increasingly murky way.

Honestly, the line between the two states of thought was blurry at the best of times. In that particular moment, it also felt full of very angry bees. Angry bees pressing in along their brain, from frontal lobe to brain stem. Each little body neatly labeled to represent something they no longer had excess focus for, pressing around and trying to make themselves known—all while knowing much of anything _directly_ was a problem.

Sometimes the bees would morph rapidly from one subject to another and back, growing and shrinking and jolting around. It would happen so fast, draw their focus so solidly, that they had no choice but to lean against the walls until the moment passed. The hallways would allow them rest then, funnily enough. Of course it made sense, in a perverse sort of way, that this chaotic series of thoughts would be what was allowed. Too much, too fast, too _many_ things going on in their head for them to sleep. To even close their eyes against the low, thrumming florescent lights of the hallways, while the bees were awake was torture. The sights were under-stimulating, but still far better than the blankness under their eyelids—where rapid flashes of ideas and concepts would fight for dominance until their head ached. Sometimes the only thing that helped was to scream as loudly as they could, voice cracking, and to pound on the walls. Not because it _helped_ , but because if they were doing something the bees were harder to hear. The most they could hope for was to be so overwhelmed that their body took to the carpet with no real input from their brain. The fibers still felt like shocks, but until they were too strong to bear, they could rest.

Occasionally it was comforting, because if their brain was full of bees it couldn’t be full of cotton fog. If it was full of bees they were focusing on _something_ other than the unending monotone of their surroundings. If they were focused on bees, they could remember black, yellow, white, red, an occasional flash of iridescent color that they attached to wings. If they thought about wings, they thought about flying. From flight to birds, and from birds to ravens. Ravens brought them solidly back to Poe and occasional mocking of the open air, suddenly fully aware from where the desire to rant to no response comes from.

_Is there somewhere sat, within these halls, a bust of Pallas far more pallid than the walls? They wondered this, and they wandered thus, questioning and questing. Came the answer, humming low: Quoth the brain bees, We Don’t Know._

April shook themselves out of pondering, if only to groan at themselves about how none of that rhymed properly and didn’t fit the flow of the original work. They put their lack of proper parody down to the hallways and kept moving. Moving helped their thoughts move, but this also gave the bees a chance to focus elsewhere. To swarm over the blatant fact that while their injuries were clotting and the most shallow were scabbing, they were apparently not healing beyond that. That for all a glance told them progress was being made with their wounds, their past experiences knew better before calling it into question. To redirect their brainpower entirely to the fact that they had no food or water, but time presumably was moving. To force them to stare down the barrel of their looming mortality, regardless if their nerves had started fuzzing out anything less than agony.

Useful, in terms of not being surprised about it, but terribly upsetting in all other regards.

Sometimes, after squeezing through a tortuously thin doorway, or crawling through a hallway that shrunk around them, it managed to get _worse_. As they lay on the dingy carpets, gasping for air and cursing their life, the bees would become wasps—those wasps would then sting into their brain, injecting a searing agony of awareness, and then _leave_. Nothing left behind, but a yawning void of numbness and understanding.

April would be left, staring at the ceiling, with total and perfect awareness of what was happening beyond anything pain brought them. A complete and total understanding that they were being toyed with, in a place that should not and logically could not exist. They were _lost_ , and they were _alone_ , and they were _never_ getting out. Getting out would require a door to the outside, and the Door had no plans to give them one. It was a toothless mouth and they had run inside, offering themselves up for digestion, and it had accepted.

If their wounds didn’t worsen—and the knowledge that they would without treatment festered in their chest—then lack of food and water would get them. Maybe infection, depending on how dirty the carpets actually were and how fast things could breed. They were going to die there, this ringing clarity told them, and it was going to _hurt_. It was going to hurt for a long, _long_ time.

And they would be afraid, the terror they insisted they did not feel wrapping around their lungs like razor wire. They would be afraid and they would have no way of saying they were not. It hurt, almost as much as their wounds and the bees, and the effort—it hurt knowing they hadn’t managed bravery. Knowing, with perfect certainty, that they would not be allowed to be brave.

It hurt more than anything they’d ever experienced.

Sometimes they would cry about it, painfully aware of the moisture they couldn’t afford to lose. It was hard to pin down what exactly was making them cry—aside of, they supposed, everything. It could well have been sadness, if a particularly final form of it. They initially weren’t sure what for, specifically. They had accepted dying quite a while before time stopped meaning anything. They often wondered, when they touched on the aching choke at their throat, if it was more about the people outside. The vast majority of the world would be neutral about this whole thing, and those that would have an opinion likely would be pleased to hear the news. The only ones that wouldn’t, they determined, would be their family and that was mostly a financial issue. They’d have to do _something_ to remember them by, whether they like it or not—just keeping up appearances. June would probably be upset, because he thought they were _good_ regardless of the facts.

He would probably be crushed for a while, but it would fade. People’s memory of them usually did, if it wasn’t negative. They studiously ignored the surfacing memory of a best friend that forgot all about them over the course of a single week that they weren’t sitting together at lunch. Not literally of course—it wasn’t like the purposeful deletion of information that the door caused. They just… were never important enough to warrant keeping around—mentally, physically, or emotionally. They were just never good enough to be remembered. This was usually when they had to gasp for breath, sobbing not really being a true option once they started drying out.

June, they would think as clearly as they could before the fog came back, would remember them. And maybe, just maybe, Shelley would remember their mystery. At least, for a little while.

More worryingly, though not for them, was that they began to more frequently find themselves crumpled against the wall in this perfect clarity—and they would be _angry_. Very little coherent thought happened when they felt this—without the slow dripping and seeping through the cotton, anger was…

It was impossible to describe in the moment, but easier afterward. Anger, they had determined long ago, was like many parts of a fire. It could smolder, like coals on a campfire, or it could flare hot and fast like dry brush in the middle of summer. Most often for them, it was like a wood burning stove.

If one sits next to a wood stove, they are warmed by the proximity. Their anger would always begin across the figurative room, and move closer until the fog returned.Controlled, but advancing without much pause. Figuratively, they had begun trying to pry open the front of the stove to grab at the coals.

It was a perfectly normal and expected reaction to being a prisoner inside an impossible prison. A perfectly normal and rational reaction to wanting to fight your way out of a situation, and realizing that you absolutely have no hope of doing so.

At first it was just that: a rational anger that burned in their chest before the coals died out and the ashes cooled under the fog. A burst of despair induced rage about the inevitability of it all, and that they would be unable to know what was happening to them until it did. A wordless, rumbling snarl at the nearest painting, as they realized this place—this _thing—_ would probably let them feel exactly how painful it all was before they finally died. It was, one could assume, simply the results of a human looking up from the bottom of their personal abyss and calling out in hopes of being heard. A voice that didn’t know when it was going to die out, screaming itself hoarse just in case.

Then, rather suddenly, it was not that.

If one had to pinpoint an exact moment for this change—impossible for several reasons—they could and indeed should point to the moment of teeth shattering clarity April experienced in front of a particularly unnerving painting.

They had felt the fog creep up on them after the last few turns, melting their internal ranking of shark species into once again unordered goo. That was annoying, really. They’d spent quite a long time remembering the difference between different sharks and all of the sudden the thresher shark was in the same mental goop that a goblin shark was in, and that wouldn’t do at all.

It was a familiar rush of anger, slowly working through the layers as they packed in. It layered thick in their head like syrup and pushed in on itself. The fog would try to make them forget, but in the wrong way where it felt like they had never had anything to forget. They had paused, grinding their teeth and staring blindly at the turn ahead, the throb of their gums pushing back against the fog. Weakly, slowly, but with every push, more of the anger freed itself and oozed through the cotton. It throbbed against the pack until it pressed so heavily in both directions, that breathing was hard as thinking clearly. With a final pulse and the taste of blood, the wasps returned to remind them where they were. What was _happening_.

This time, though, this swarm of lucidity was not met with unnameable emotions. It was met, as many unjust things of this nature had been in their life, with a feeling of distilled fury. They had, if one were to fall to metaphor, stuck their arm elbow deep into the stove while coated in napalm.

April was, very suddenly, totally aware that they were standing in the belly of a thing that wanted to devour them. That _was_ devouring them, some very tired part of themselves remembered. They were also completely aware that, by all accounts they should be dead, but weren’t. Probably, they assumed, from sheer spite. Spite, they determined as they took the chance to survey their surroundings with unprecedented presence of mind, was a wonderful motivator. And they felt _incredibly_ motivated at that _exact_ second.

The hallways, for all their boring aesthetics, were novel in terms of layout. They were quite like mazes, yes, but with a random element that left no real assurance that there was an exit.

Logically, if the hallways were a gut working on them like gristle, then _logically_ there were ways in and out of that situation. Two, at minimum. Logic, of course, was not thick on the terrible gray carpeting, but they were suddenly not in the mood to play by the rules the hallway decided on. No, in fact, they had rather decided that they would take the rules and do several things contrary to them, just because they could in the moment. First on that list, would be treating a door that should not be a door, as neither a door or what it appeared to be.

Before them hung a painting—one of the few splashes of color at the ends of the hallways, if you could call those spots ends. It was the same one that hung at every corner where there was only one obvious path. It depicted a man sculpting something, wet red clay spattered across his clothes. The man was hard to describe in a way that they were deeply uncomfortable with, though it wasn’t due to fog this time. Partially it was because they’d lost their glasses—couldn’t tell when or where—and partially because they weren’t entirely sure if he would be so strange to look at outside of the hallways. The best they could settle on, at this point, was that he was short and parts of him hadn’t been informed of it. The thing he was sculpting wasn’t much better, a mass of twists and curves that melded into right angles and hard lines. The only thing that was ever different about the paintings were the sculptures—and the _how_ was always just out of reach to them.

It didn’t really matter, they supposed.

The whole of the thing was boiled down at that point, mentally. At the end of the day, it was a door hidden in something that wasn’t.

Looking at it, it was very hard to not barrel through, angry and forced into one option by the fog trying hard to regain control. Hard, almost impossible—but impossible was what this place was. It was an impossible door, an impossible set dressing, and—they decided after kicking it off of the wall—now it was going to be garbage.

Their fingers weren’t up to the job of prying the canvas from the board it was wrapped around and they didn’t want to risk going through accidentally, so they did the next best thing: snapping the obnoxiously patterned frame into chunks and stabbing through the back until they heard it tear.

The doorway, not the fabric—the fabric made more of a static noise, each paint chip coming off with the sound of breaking china. The doorway, though—the thing that made the painting impossible—came apart with a tearing sound they’d only ever heard when tearing a muscle. Normally, they’d be disquieted by that comparison, but at the moment they were almost giddy with a change in the script.

“You fucked with the wrong cockroach.” They knew they weren’t talking to anyone, but it felt good to croak and growl at something. Their throat was thick and dry, but spite can do wonderful things for someone’s ability to do things they shouldn’t. They took their broken off piece of frame and pushed it firmly against the wallpaper, not hard enough to pierce but enough to make their fingers ache. “You’re a _liar_. But you lied to the wrong fucking person.”

Eloquent it was not, but if something were listening, they felt they got the point across as they put more weight on the frame. They waited until they felt just a bit of give under it, and then shoved downward with all their might. The point slipped from where it had sunk in the soft wall to the still rigid surroundings, tearing the wallpaper and more underneath. A more present mind would have noticed the shudder to the rest of the wall, but their mind was solidly focused on how the gash began to ooze.

Results, thy name was April.

They repeated the motion, sometimes slipping off of warping wall, and other times tearing out large chunks before the frame snapped apart in their hands. The carpet quickly swallowed the bits that fell, along with the rest of the frame, before tugging at their shoes.

Some small part of them said that running would probably be a good idea. No input on where to run, of course, or what to do with the fact that the whole place was pulsing as technicolor sludge soaking into the carpet. Or the low thrumming sound that came with the walls shifting closer to them.

The only thing their brain eventually came up with, in the midst of dodging the goo’s advances, was to shatter a picture frame and use the glass before it fell apart. Using it, of course, meant there was very quickly a _lot_ more goo which was not ideal.Slashing worked until the writhing tendrils to reached where the walls had boxed them in. For a split second, they considered that they might be crushed to death after all their pondering about starving.

That was immediately followed by the rapid acceptance that death would still, in fact, be an exit and be exactly what they had wanted out of this situation.

_That_ thought was accompanied by the very strange sensation of extreme hot and cold as the— _blood?_ _Was that what that was?_ —started slithering up their legs. It was the antithesis of a feeling wrapped in the one they expected and, to put it mildly, they did not like it at all. It felt like being stuck in a boiling pot after getting frostbite, or rolled in coals and then dropped in the arctic. The feeling lasted for an eternity, and also just a second, and also possibly an hour—before the cotton came rushing back and their head connected with gray carpet.

The thing about being consumed with anger, especially if one has not made their life around it, is that _normally_ a large enough jolt would end it. If one has very little else to have based their emotions on, it becomes less like a feeling and more a state of being that is extremely hard to shake. To return to the previous analogy, most people—with few exceptions—only ever feel anger on the level of a small fire that burns for a few hours. At most, the general population will experience only a few great bonfires that don’t die for days. When the anger one is used to feeling is self immolation for the warmth of others, one gets very good at keeping those embers alive for a long time. On the whole, it means not thinking particularly hard about things—instinct and the desire to protect usually get things done. Lacking a task, however, leaves you with the very basic directive of causing harm until your body crumbles away and extinguishes itself. It is not a pretty process, nor is it pleasant to undertake.

There were astonishingly few mental through-lines that survived impact in April’s head, and they almost entirely consisted of the thought ‘ _If it bleeds, I can kill it_ ’. Secondary among them was a particularly acidic thread of hope, stringing from their heart to their head. This was important, because without it, a pyre can become a wildfire and destroy far more than deserved it. Without a line of reason, there is only desolation. There is, granted, a point at which the sheer desire to do harm has no aim, no direct purpose aside of building its own momentum and doing damage.And that point, for April, was approximately about the time that ugly yellow door slammed shut behind them.

They couldn’t have said how they made it to their feet, or if they actually had. They also couldn’t have said what the first thing they got their hands on was, but they knew distinctly that it was heavy.

The fog was thick again—pressing down on their head like a physical weight—and scrambled their senses even more. It was almost to the point they were getting passing flashes of their own actions more than doing them. The only really clear thing going on was that they were in pain after a few large motions, and something was screaming. It might have been them, there was no way to tell.

What _could_ tell what was happening, with intimate awareness, was the hallways.

And it was not happy.

They had barreled through the fog rather abruptly, pounding on walls until their fists hit a mirror. Falling to their knees as the shards cut at them, they had scrambled to find them without knowing what they were. Their fingers grasped tightly to the largest shard they could hold and they did their level best to fill the place with rainbow. The shard melted like ice after a dozen cuts, and they opted instead to grab onto a flayed bit of wallpaper. And then they hauled backward until it ripped clean away.

Another convulsion rippled through the hallways and this time the sludge grasped their throat before dragging them under, into a darkness so absolute they thought they’d been blinded. There was air, yes, but it was stale and thick with dust. It held them there—it couldn’t and wouldn’t say how long—until fear began to flow from them again. This time, though, they were under until the fear was a steady stream—it didn’t really matter to the Distortion that the fear was of the darkness and not itself. A meal is a meal, even if it was getting indigestion. Once they were ready, it dropped them roughly into a hallway completely devoid of mirrors or photos.

April had slowly worked themselves to their feet, and blinked around with a look it didn’t understand. They limped their way down the hall for a while, before stopping by one of the plants. It was a nice one, it had chosen that one specifically for the twisting shape of its leaves. They considered it for a moment, and then promptly smashed it’s vase and—digging into the wallpaper with a shard that was mostly bone—took off running down the length of the hallway. It made sure to let them trip headlong into a yawning pit inside itself, and then again in the darkness.

Next it dropped them back first into the carpet. This section of it had only walls, ceiling, and floor. Confident that this annoying bit of stomach trouble was solved, it looked away. April, meanwhile, paced up and down the hallway—not turning, not even looking more than once down the second hallway that arched out of view at either end. Experimentally, they scratched against the wall and frowned. There were no seams to find purchase on. They paused, then, staring very intently down at the floor. With a look of renewed purpose, they strode confidently to what could be graciously called a turn, and sat themselves against one of the walls. They then started methodically pulling threads out of the floor and shoving them in their pockets. Some would try to squirm out and back to the floor, but were quickly thwarted by them tying the threads together in clumps as they went.

Initially this was… fine wouldn’t be the word it would have used, but it wasn’t _as_ immediately painful as their other attempts. They weren’t the first meal to try to fight their way out, and wouldn’t be the last if humanity continued to be human. It still didn’t _like_ it, as much as it could be said to like or dislike anything. It felt April’s attempts were much like one of it’s victims getting therapy before it took them, and being able to stave it off for a day or two longer than normal. Mildly inconvenient, irritating, and ultimately futile. If this snack wanted to mindlessly obsess over its carpet, it felt no real need to stop them. Well, at first.

After a good hundred feet of carpet being violently and meticulously uprooted, it had gone from feeling like an upset stomach to what it assumed appendicitis was like for a human. It had the strangest urge to vomit—not that it could or likely would—and it very much did not like that. Novelty was supposed to be induced by, and not executed upon it, thank you very much.

Around the time April had finished a single hall and turned to start on the next one, it dropped them into sensory deprivation again. The threads of it’s poor carpet squirmed back out and into nothing so it could replace them as it saw fit. They thrashed about as it’s total lack of sensation wrapped around them, eventually falling limp. It wasn’t resignation, but an extremely annoying level of patience.

It would have to plan with a bit more specificity than it was really comfortable doing for a simple meal, apparently.

Opting to remove their ability to pluck at fibers, it dropped them unceremoniously onto an endless spiral staircase. Nothing but a blindingly bright stairway, hard and smooth, and isolated in a void. They slid down a good twenty steps before catching themselves on the railing with a groan. Injuries and a lack of equilibrium from the fall made it difficult to get upright, but they managed after a fashion. They then spent quite a long time trying to work up the moisture to spit over the side, before giving up. They tried simply resting, as there were no walls to press them onward or upward—only to find that the stairs melted into a slide at the opportunity to hound them. Their solution to this was to do their resting while linking their arm around the railing. It compensated by making the railing loose and rickety, not coming apart under their weight so much as making them far too unnerved to actually rely on it. This was followed almost immediately by them shimmying a baluster out of the railing and doing their level best to dig away at the stairs. Flattening into a ramp just made them shove the baluster between the steps going down and let them dig in, tearing their way down a considerable distance before it put them in deprivation again. This time, it didn’t allow them the realization they were breathing.

It tried a similar plan again, but with no railings—initially they were there to keep victims from simply jumping and breaking their necks before it got its fill. Now, it was almost entirely alright with the idea that April would go sliding off the edge and it could just get on with its life. They recovered themselves just before going off the side, and started climbing. They were limping heavily now, and staring around very intently. Eventually they fell to their knees on a landing, and it was reasonably sure they were done. No, they just started clawing at the ground with chipped and jagged nails until its skin tore just enough to cling to.

It dropped them into deprivation before they decided to hold onto its body and jump off the side.

Next was an endless void, full of pitch black and looming shapes that they could only just make out. Sudden flashes of far away lights and sounds that were meant to convince them they were not alone. They tried to call out to the figures they thought they saw, but got no response. They wandered for a time, trying to feel the floor only to find themselves standing upside down. In the distance were images mirrored from their own mind, tricks to keep them thinking they were being deprived only to be overwhelmed. They trashed and screamed, before settling into just flexing their hands and laughing. A strangled sound, now, but a laugh.

It felt… _annoyed_ could have been a word for it, when it realized they were not, in fact, laughing as their mind unraveled.

“What, can’t let me break things anymore?” They croaked, slowly flexing each finger. “I told you, I know you’re a liar. You’re a liar, and I’ve been more afraid of children than I am of you right now. You’re just a liar and I know your game.”

This was a lie—they _were_ afraid. The shape of their fear told it that they were not afraid of _i_ _t_ in a very maddening way, but they were afraid. It sank them into another void, this one an echo of how it had taunted them after nightmares.

They were inside it, being devoured one desperate doubt against themselves at a time, and yet they were not afraid of _it_. Not exactly. Notes of darkness, with a hint of the primal fear of being inextricably part of a food chain they could not control, and the thick flavorless taste of mortality… all were pleasantly present, but not the _doubt_. There was a concrete certainty that sat inside it like a stone, a stone tied directly to this particularly stubborn source of energy. There were flashes, yes, when they were being dragged into the nothing that it maintained between hallways—a millisecond of doubt that flashed across their being like lightning. Flashes that were buried as quickly and as deeply as they came.

If it knew how, it would have been frustrated.

Again, it didn’t _matter_ the flavor so long as fear flooded their being and shed into its halls. It could, it mused, kill them and be done with the whole issue. They were already taking more than enough of it’s attention away from stalking around for more prey. Planning upcoming events. It could multitask, never truly being focused on one thing—but this was… it didn’t have the capacity for annoyance in the same way the humans it fed on did. It did, however, understand as a function of making humans not understand. Thus, it _understood_ that it had a choice:

Kill them personally, in as confusing a way it could manage to wring out what it could from them—or, given everything else going on, toss them out and come back to them later, when they were easier to digest.

On one hand, it could manifest as exactly the neon nightmare they imagined it was inside—flashing lights being heard, clanging sounds being felt, and sensations running over their tongue. It could watch them struggle through their scrambled senses, grasping at meaning where it did not allow any to exist. It could allow them the clarity to know exactly what was so, so terribly wrong. It could, and this would be what would feed it the most, skewer them with its own limbs while they tried to taunt it. They would, of course, be looking at it’s hands at what they think is a safe distance. There is no safe distance, but it would let them think it. Then it would slowly normalize its hallways, until all they had left were their final dying moments as their realization washed the final rush of fear out of their soon-to-be corpse.

It would get just enough back to make up for the time its taken to wring out what it’s already gotten. Possibly just a little more than what it had already spent pushing through their mental barriers and building on cobwebs that were there long before it found them. What it had thought was going to be a rich vein of terror turned into more of a puzzle and while it _usually_ enjoyed teasing apart someone’s mind, this had very much been a waste of time. It had no other term for the final count on the matter.

The other option, of course, was to drop them somewhere and come back when it _did_ have the time. When it was _more_ and needed something that was decidedly _less_ to see it becoming so. It rather liked that idea, but that lead to a problem it felt obligated to solve.

Many things wanted to consume them, and many things had been trying before it even noticed them. It had, originally, started entirely because of the other’s interest—though it couldn’t possibly say what the others saw in them. Perhaps the others had simply already sunk enough energy into feeding on them that it behooved them to keep trying. It didn’t matter, really, not to it.

What did matter was that it made food storage a decidedly difficult arrangement.

Putting them back in their home would just drop them into the waiting maw of The Forever Blind’s hunting dog, at the very least. I Do Not Know You’s scouts were likely still pretending they were focused on Too Close I Cannot Breathe, but would still be on the lookout for them to feed their leaders thirst for revenge. He would excuse the chase away as a connection to The Choke drawing him to them, instead of pettiness. _That_ lie had brought it what could be called pleasure, if it were to stoop to labels. There was also the matter of the Mother of Puppets—though it doubted the Web would act in any way that was direct. In it’s experience, if the Spider wanted something done, it would be done with very little input from anything else regardless of location.

It thought for a moment, feeling April squirm in a pocket of sensory overload that they were trying to scream their way through. They didn’t know they were screaming, just that it was repeating it back to them louder. Brighter. Lights flashed around them and what felt like inside their eyes—overwhelming, overloading, agony. They had started clawing at their arms and scalp, trying to stop the overwhelming sensations by clinging to one they knew. It threw in some sonic booms to really make them hurt, and enjoyed the rush of despair when they started to panic.

The problem wasn’t so much that they would suffer from the others, so much as that they might be consumed before it could pick them back up. The solution, it supposed, would be to place them somewhere where _action_ is very much not the order of the day—not someplace where they might be valued enough to get comfortable and have a more effective counter to it than rage, but someplace where they will be once again _used_ and considered nothing more than a resident curiosity. Where their neurosis could be allowed to flourish until they collapsed under the weight of their own delusions and they held themselves in place to feed it later.

Someplace that could keep an eye on them.

If it had the ability to have a face, it would have smiled.

* * *

Being conscious when they were dropped face first onto a tile floor was not at the top of April’s list of things they enjoyed doing. It ranked a lot further up than ‘face down on stairs’, but it still left a lot to be desired. There were no lights, but it didn’t feel like the yawning lack of light in the hallways—just a normal, mundane darkness. That almost upped it in the rankings before they realized they were not alone. It was mostly given away by the short ‘huh’ they caught a few feet ahead of them, though whoever it was didn’t seem to be trying terribly hard to conceal themselves.

“My, you don’t belong down here, do you?” The tone was conversational, at least. Their head was too fuzzy to know if they should try to get away or not—not that their body was up to it. They’d burned a lot of their options staying as angry as they had, for as long as they had, and that was not ideal. Footsteps carried the source of the voice further away before light flooded the room with a click and their stomach lurched. So much for dodging the migraine. They were able to make out cabinets and shelves, though it made their world spin to do so. The voice continued as it started moving back toward them. “Traditionally, people enter buildings through the front and not through… whatever that was. Ah, well, I won’t hold it against you—it seems like you’ve had a quite rough enough time as it is.”

From what they could see, he at least had a face and that’s as much as they cared about when he came to a stop ahead of them. The bright gray of his eyes stood out most, though. Primarily because they seemed to be looking at something several inches inside them and not at them specifically. He made no move to help them up as they tried again to shift positions, and instead let out a low whistle as he finally seemed to look at them as a whole. He then cleared his throat when they looked up at him and tried to croak out literally anything that might have been a question.

“Right, apologies. New situation for all concerned, I suppose.” He fished around in his jacket pocket for a phone and checked the time, before sliding it back away. Even blurred through a black eye and a lack of glasses, they didn’t find his look of concern particularly genuine. “Do try to lay still. I’ve called you an ambulance and it should be here shortly. I expect you’ll pass out before then, unfortunately.”

Another attempted croak of a question and he opened his mouth to answer, before looking smugly embarrassed.

“Where are my manners. Just because you can’t speak doesn’t mean I can’t. Terribly sorry.” They tried to move again, groaning as their head felt light and their vision managed to blur even more. He gave them a smile that was probably supposed to be friendly, but came off more like he was amused. They could hear people in the distance, but things were starting to fade. “You can call me Elias. Do try to live through this, if you would. You have some fascinating questions to help me answer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its my fic and i choose the ponderous literary influences my characters cling to like a fuzzy body pillow.   
> also i would have posted sooner but my heart decided to be dramatic so it took me a bit. but it is here, yay
> 
> also even as i wrote it, i wanted to throw elias in a dumpster


	8. N41: The Other Side of Delivery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, its been in the 100F range for the last like week and my heart has still been wigging out so writing was a lot of work this time. Well, more than usual.   
> So, instead of a monster i give u another connecting chapter that is mostly me lovingly writing Eric being very tired.

Eric Delano, for all the eldritch bullshit he had to wade through on any given day, had a very straight forward life.

He would get up in the morning, spend a good hour or so watching television, and then get ready for work. He would then go to the Institute, clock in, and do nothing for the next few hours until lunch time. Then, if Michael wasn’t up to going to lunch that day, he would wander to the chip shop down the street and sit there for a few hours. Mostly he’d spend that time pondering how his life had come to this, or if his son was doing well. The last bit usually kept him there the longest, prodding at his food and not really existing too hard. At some point in his unfocused meal, he’d half notice his watch and remember time existed before heading back to work. This was mostly for Michael’s benefit, because the _last_ thing Michael Shelley needed more of was entries in the ‘reasons to worry about Eric’ list.

Especially, he concluded, after they’d returned from America with far more questions than answers.

Following up their investigation of the May house with an investigation of the meat shop had revealed nothing unusual beyond a strong enough stench of blood to make them both gag. They’d had to prop as many doors open as possible just to stand the air, which was probably why the place was even more abandoned than they had expected. Well, abandoned in terms of _people_. There were plenty of insects and spiders, a self contained ecosystem of rot, reproduction, hunting and consumption that made Eric’s skin crawl. He advised Michael not to think terribly hard about the stains in the loading bay that still seemed to glisten wetly under their flashlights. Even though a crime scene cleaning crew had gone through, it certainly felt like the building was trying to forget that. It had, after all, had three years to fester itself back into the state they had found it in. He half expected some hive-filled transient to hove into the room as they took readings, though none did.

The next stop was the hospital, and had only contained a lead to Simone Hartnell. Who, apparently, had no earthly clue who April May _was_ until Michael produced a yearbook photo that June had given them for their file. She apparently was under the impression that April had passed away earlier that year—when asked where she’d heard that, she said something noncommittal about a ‘friend she talked to on her smoke breaks’. Police records about the investigation three years back dubbed it a cold case, though there were a few accounts from some of the tech crew that had presumably escaped after April had distracted the notpeople. Each one was remarkably vague about what had happened, with one exception. A young man that told police he’d followed very close behind April and had been trying to hoist the loading bay door with them when they were hauled backward into the dark. He hadn’t been aware of where they’d gone after he got out and called for help. Eric had been very careful to not let Michael read about how the young man described the screams. He refused a follow up interview when contacted.

The only really productive results they got out of the whole thing were several half finished statements April seemed to have been working on before they moved to wall writing, and those were just more support for Eric’s theory that Washington was just cursed. Something about a neighbor’s pet wolf, meandering writings about space, and a single sheet about their interactions with spiders.

Well, that and the mountains of seismic and geologic data they’d gotten a hold of on their way there. Gertrude had redirected them pretty forcefully once nothing particularly Buried related had cropped up, much to both of their dismay. Eric, being who he was as a person, had spent an extra day briefing June on what could possibly turn up after they left—he didn’t go into Smirke’s fourteen, or specifics, but he’d wanted to give the kid something. He’d also wanted to delay taking the crash course in geology and everything else for as long as possible. He had a masters in _library science_ , not ‘here is what Gertrude wants me to look through today’.

He and Michael had done it, of course, because it wasn’t really a _choice_. Unfortunately the data was still daunting entirely because of the sheer volume of it.

It was this very data he’d slunk away from to get an extremely early lunch, because you can only stare at graphs for so many weeks before you start hating numbers and lines. He felt bad for leaving Michael alone with it—he wasn’t any better versed in it than Eric was, for all his usual enthusiasm—but he was _tired_ and mid-May was a nice enough time of year that he could almost pretend to like life. That said he also felt bad about skipping out on analysis of the data _and_ helping the girls sift through their own mountain of readings they’d hauled in from a night of ghost hunting.

They’d spent the night combing through some old workhouse that had been found half buried under a warehouse—some urban explorers had reported seeing apparitions and having physical interactions with them, before the apparitions would scream and disappear as if crushed. Emma was banking on the Buried keeping energy around to taunt it, while Sarah was swearing up and down that the entities were irrelevant to whatever haunting was happening. They’d wanted he and Michael to help sift through it all, primarily because they got in at four in the morning and had been working since. Because neither of them had heard the word sleep and taken it as a suggestion in their entire lives, he assumed.

Michael, as dedicated as he was to finding some meaning in the data, was probably squinting at monitors with Sarah at this point. Muttering something about energy fluctuations, and debating consciousness in ghosts. Slowly driving himself blind while staring at the screen because heaven forbid he wear his readers for it—Eric decided this was the point where he was going to stop that line of thought. It was, he presumed, coming from just how sullen Michael had been on the flight back.

Damn him and still feeling things like _emotions_.

He swung by a coffee shop on the way back from lunch, determined to buy off whatever looks of displeasure were going to be leveled at him. Some blended drink that was more whipped cream than coffee for Michael. Emma preferred a nice black tea with a spoonful of sugar at the bottom. Sarah was a touch harder to remember, because he was old and she’d only been around a short time. Eventually he settled on a blended drink for her as well, with an extra shot of coffee. He was rather proud of himself for remembering what everyone liked—rather Michael about the whole thing.

He was working his way through his smoothie on the way down the stairs to the archives when Elias had power-walked past him without even a faux personable hello. He didn’t mind, so much as—no, actually, he _did_ because for Elias Bouchard to not trap him in a conversation that would end in him seething next to a filing cabinet, something had to be wrong. With a capital W, underlined, bold, and in seventy point font.

Things seemed calm when he reached the assistants bullpen, though he was hardly the only one to have noticed Elias.

“ _Please_ tell me something’s on fire.” He followed the way Sarah was leaning around her desk and frowned at the door to document storage. Michael tut’d at him and looked between the area around his face, and the coffee. “Yes, I brought coffee. Have your prescription whipped cream.”

“ _Thank you._ ” Michael either didn’t catch the sarcasm, or he very desperately needed the pick me up. The amount of melting the he did into his office chair after the first pull said he needed it. “Did he say why he was going that way?”

Sarah’s drink was pulled from the carrier and spirited away to her desk before he could answer him. The telltale ‘first sip’ sound was exceptionally loud, if you asked him, but he was also a terribly grumpy person. She either didn’t notice the look on his face, or was just too asleep to care. By the way she was swaying back and forth with half an eye on the tiny television they used for tape, he couldn’t fault her too harshly.

“Eric Delano, marry me.” She sounded less awake than she looked, which was a feat. He responded with an amused snort, which she answered by sticking out her tongue. He shook his head as he moved further into the bullpen, on the off chance Elias came sprinting back out of document storage. He’s willingly wear a lot of things, but tea and smoothie were not on the list. He gingerly navigated around the bags of equipment they’d not yet gotten to putting away, rolling his eyes at the page of noted timestamps on Sarah’s desk. She was being very thorough, but it also looked like her notes were mostly ‘and then a chair moved’. She playfully prodded him with a pencil as he passed.

“You only love me for my money.”

“Of course, all that sweet senior assistant money.” She nodded sagely. “That and your intense hatred of daytime television.”

“I knew I had redeeming qualities somewhere.” He passed Emma her tea and took the silent nod as the high appreciation it was, coming from her. “No, but Elias didn’t even try to trap me into being _personable_ to him. Did you hear anything? The sounds of evil pages coming over a beeper?”

“A beeper? Christ, you didn’t need to take the senior part so literally. No, its just been footage and Michael groaning about rocks.” Sarah shot the blond a smile while he looked from her, to his desk with a grimace. He promptly popped the lid off his coffee with a huff. He was apparently forgoing any real form of pretending to be dignified, and had moved straight into eating the whipped cream off the top of his coffee. Eric felt slightly bad, because _usually_ he’d at least wait till it was all at the bottom of the cup and get a spoon from the break room, using the time as an unofficial decompression. Right now he was eating it like the action was meant to be a threat against the papers on his desk. That said, this was the same man that would scold his pen caps for rolling off his desk if he set them aside instead of onto the end, though, so he really shouldn’t have been surprised. Sarah snorted as he got whipped cream on his nose, and stretched. “What would evil’s ringtone be, anyway? The Imperial ma—wait, do you hear that?”

Michael frowned through wiping off his nose and cocked his head to the side.

“Sounds like an ambulance?” He raised an eyebrow at Eric, who was just as confused. “Did you leave the doors open? As in, all of them?”

Now, Eric’s ears weren’t what they used to be, but he didn’t need to have super hearing to pick up what was very clearly just that. Which was odd, because the archives were in the basement, behind several long hallways, a stairwell/elevator, and several doors that were usually kept closed. Unless Elias had called for a massive amount of restructuring without telling anyone, the only time that the archives weren’t totally isolated from the rest of the Institute was if there was an _emergency_ that required quick and easy movement between sections. Meaning, generally, someone had either fallen off of something in the library because someone couldn’t be bothered to get an actual ladder, or _whatever_ it was that Artifact storage was up to most of the time.

He perked up a bit as the sounds of people coming down the stairs echoed through.

“Hey, do you think—”

“Gertrude’s out today. No dice, Delano.” Emma hummed, sipping her tea and watching the hallway. Michael paused his threatening whipped cream attack to give him a look. He pointedly ignored it. “But no one’s come past, either.”

Sure enough, an ambulance crew appeared in the hallway and asked the way to document storage—just in time for Elias to appear in the doorway and usher them inside. He then disappeared in after them, only to reappear moments later to stand in the entryway of the assistants bullpen and watch the medics start figuring out how to get a stretcher in. He would _usually_ , in Eric’s opinion, be hovering to make sure nothing got jostled or damaged. He _certainly_ would not be lingering outside line of sight when the institutes documentation was just… there. Either Elias liked his odds on whatever what happening more than he disliked people getting into places, or he had some other slimy little plan. After a few moments of he and the other assistants exchanging glances and trying to internally nominate who was going to ask the question, Eric decided to bite the bullet. Because pissing off management was, apparently, in his job description right next to selling his soul to an eldritch voyeur.

“Elias, I hate that I’m the one asking this, but what the hell is going on?” Eric didn’t like him. He didn’t like anyone that had the power to fire him and didn’t, but right now he _hated_ knowing the terrible little bureaucrat was up to something. He chalked it up to more of that curiosity that kept biting him in the ass. In response, Elias just grinned his usual ‘I know more than you’ grin and peered back down the hallway as a stretcher was being brought down. “Elias, I swear to Christ—”

He was waved off.

“Not now, if you please, Eric. I’m thinking.”

He really didn’t please.  
“Who’s in there?”

“A mystery.”

“That’s not—”

The grin fell off Elias’ face in exchange for a look of exasperation.

“I’m afraid I’m being _quite_ serious, Eric. I haven’t the foggiest idea who they’re tending to right now. Well, not _fully._ That would take a bit more work than I had time to do.” He caught sight of the skeptical look on Eric’s face and shrugged a shoulder. “We both know I have my ways, but I _am_ only human. It’s a surprise all around.”

He didn’t come off as puzzled, though, or even a baseline curious—no, he seemed almost _giddy_ about the fact there was a random person being seen to by medics in document storage. Elias continued to be a terrible little man that made no sense and Eric didn’t think that was going to stop any time soon.

By the time that the stretcher was being brought out, Eric had returned to his desk to at least pretend to be looking at work. Mostly, he was observing and getting done about the same amount of work everyone else was. Well, excluding Emma, but she seemed to be moving onto the point where she wanted to stab the VCR with her letter opener after the fifth time she had to rewind to get a timestamp, so it all shook out.

He hadn’t been sure what he’d expected, really.

Maybe a researcher that hopped the chain of document pulls and had an accident, caught because they bled on some statement or another that Elias particularly cared about. Someone from the reference library that didn’t have the patience to deal with Gertrude’s mess of the in-review stacks, and went for the at least vaguely ordered document storage. Hell, maybe it was one of the new interns that thought they’d find the answer to their own weird experience and… well, fainted or something. At worst he imagined someone hit their head. That didn’t cover Elias not knowing who they were—he was annoyingly on top of employee information—but if they were new, maybe. Or it was a poorly executed attack on the archives and a cleaning crew would be in at some point later. Not that those were usually carried out as solo missions; it was usually a small army. He supposed an avatar of the Lonely might try it solo, but he didn’t see the Lukas family caring enough while they were funding the place. The irony of the Lonely having a specific group was not lost on him as he filed that idea to the side. He also assumed Elias wouldn’t have been unaware of a Lukas kicking around down there, but he could always be wrong.

What he didn’t expect, for a few obvious reasons, was someone who looked like they’d been hit by a truck. He only caught a fleeting glimpse of the person’s face as they were carried out, and it looked bad enough that he could almost feel his face hurting in response. He also caught sight of how wide Elias’ grin had gotten as the person on the stretcher was jostled slightly on the way up the stairs, producing an uncomfortably small, pained groan.

“Elias,” Eric was debating getting up because there were only so many ways someone ended up looking like that, and if it wasn’t Elias that did it, they were going to have _problems_. New ones, with polish on them that made them all together more slippery. He couldn’t _do_ anything, but at least standing up might help with a slight feeling of control. “What the fuck is going on?”

Once the ambulance crew was out of sight, Elias deigned to actually acknowledge his audience. He also seemed much more buttoned up again, which could _not_ have been a good sign.

“Nothing to worry about—well, slight staining aside. Nothing the janitorial staff won’t be able to handle.” He fished his phone out of his pocket and started typing very deliberately. “Fascinating, really. I didn’t think that would be able to get in here…”

“Why were they— _What_ couldn’t get in? I will take literally any actual answer.” He grit his teeth as Elias did a good job of looking like he was listening. In reality he was very clearly composing an email. He hated him, so, so much. “ _Elias what did that to them?_ ”

Elias sighed and pressed send with conviction. The look he then gave Eric made his skin crawl. It was an odd mixture of annoyance and condescension—like he was simply not seeing something he should have been able to puzzle out already. That, or perhaps it was simply that he found it a particularly heavy burden to have to explain things. Eric felt it shouldn’t be _too_ heavy to tell your employee if there was a monster or something lurking around.

“I already told you: _I don’t know, Eric_. It’s quite a gripping little surprise, really.” With another smile, this time a bit more on the human side, he straightened his suit jacket and took a step into the hallway. “Now, if you’ll excuse me everyone, I have some arrangements to make. Best of luck with everyone’s research! And do be careful reading over those graphs, Eric, wouldn’t want you to strain your eyes _too_ much.”

“Fuck off.”

He hummed in response and left at a much more relaxed pace than he’d entered with. Silence reigned for about two seconds after the stairwell door thudded closed.

“ _What in the fuck—_ ” Sarah gestured wildly at the hallway with her empty cup. “You all heard that, right?”

“I don’t know what I expected.” Eric sighed and slumped a bit in his chair, while everyone else seemed to be processing an actual response. Everyone was also watching the hallway with not a small amount of dismay.

“Did someone break in?” Michael was far less phased than Sarah seemed comfortable with. He gave her a look that he probably thought was reassuring. “Things… happen here now and then. Normally they’re a bit more explosive, though. And Elias doesn’t usually deal with them. Or seem to care that much. You get used to it.”

“I know about the _monsters_ , Michael.” She dropped her cup into the waste bin and squinted at the hall. Michael managed to not frown too deeply before he went back to eating his coffee. Granted, it was a lot more contemplative now. Sarah didn’t seem to care that she’d almost missed. “ _People_ magically showing up in the archives is not what anyone told me about.”

“To be fair,” Eric shuffled the papers on his desk around a bit, if only to line them up. If he could do nothing else, he was going to organize and then figure the rest out after. “I _did_ tell you we get weird people in.”

“Not looking like they’ve been mauled, you didn’t!” She lightly smacked her palm against her notes, the actual tape she’d been watching totally forgotten. “I expected people having lost limbs to werewolves, or someone claiming to have been kidnapped by vampires! Not ‘they got scraped off a car crash and thrown in with the filing’!”

Eric nodded, because really, he had to give her that one.

“What I want to know,” Emma had either solidly ignored the others, or was still in the process of staying awake. Either way, she had their attention through sheer fact that if she wanted to know something, it was going to be known. Usually whether anyone else wanted it to be or not. “Is if this was a break in, what happened to leave them… like that. Sarah and I got in around five and ordered takeaway before you two got in. I stayed here while she fetched it. I assume you didn’t see anything out of the ordinary bringing it down?”

“No.” Sarah huffed and propped her feet on one of her open desk drawers. “Only one I saw kicking around was Terry, getting the last of the floor polishing done and most he’d hurt is a sandwich.”

“Right. And I pulled a document for Gertrude on the Yang case just after _you’d_ left for the evening.” Emma gestured to Michael, before pursing her lips and looking down her nose at the door to Gertrude’s office. “So either they entered and were wounded when they got here, _or_ they were wounded in storage… both are rather unlikely.”

“They could have _actually_ been hit by a car and wandered in… without anyone noticing.” Michael hummed and tugged lightly at a curl before shaking his head. “Maybe a mishap with artifact storage? Could have hid down here in a panic. Spooky teleportation accident?”

“Possibly.”

“We all know its spooky bullshit, yeah?” Eric grumbled, sliding more of the reports into files. He was damned if he was going to actually look at them more than necessary when he could be doing literally anything else. It also meant longer to wait before they all inevitably went to peer around document storage like they knew what to do if they _did_ find something. “We’re all aware of that?”

Emma rolled her eyes and he almost thought she looked like she’d smelled something sour.

“Yes, Eric, like everything else we handle it’s _spooky_.” She straightened up in her chair and took another sip of her tea. He wasn’t quite sure how she’d managed to nurse it that long, but he supposed it was the sort of vague witchcraft that happened down there. “But some of us _like_ solving mysteries.”

He hummed in response. Michael, unfortunately, was on the side of asking more questions. Damn him.

“ _I_ want to know how Elias knew.” This earned a puzzled look from Sarah and a contemplative one from Emma. “I mean, I know security patrols the grounds all night, but they could hardly have seen someone come in and then just… done nothing until Elias was done with his afternoon tea. Much less after we’d all come in.”

Well, now it was time for archives soap opera: How were they all going to dance around telling Michael their boss was connected to some eldritch horror. And that said boss liked to watch them like it was Big Brother.

Not that he’d been keen to keep him in the dark like the others—but something always came up when he tried to tell him anything specific. A phone call, someone coming in, a fire alarm, someone coming down for a statement. It could well have been premeditated, or Emma and Gertrude’s desire to lie was strong enough to start influencing fate. Far more likely, of course, was that the Web was sitting somewhere taking much too much glee in giving him an even harder time than the world already was. All while the Eye and it’s lapdog—a position he assumed was simply passed along with Elias’ job title—watched it all happen. Almost as soon as he’d internally deadpanned, he was struck by the realization that… well, there _were_ no eye related things in document storage, unless he missed them. Sure, there were the eyes worked into the architecture, but document storage was much more utilitarian. To insulate it a bit more from the temperature, all the walls were lined with something and then drywall was hung over that. It was a rather terrible solution to the problem of temperature getting to the documents, but it worked better than the alternative, which was nothing really separating storage from being just a particularly large closet. The closest eye Eric could place to document storage was on the door frame going in—the one on the other side was under the same padding as the rest—and that… well if that had seen something happening, then so would have several other things.

This either also occurred to the others, or they honestly didn’t know.

“I mean they _could._ Can’t imagine their pay’s much better than anyone else, and it’s not like the archives are worth a lot. Not compared to artifacts, or something in payroll.” Sarah chewed at her bottom lip, already displeased with her own answer. She took to bouncing her foot a bit against the thin metal of her drawer, focusing hard on how it bent back and forth. “And we all keep odd hours. If someone new was on guard last night, its possible. Just left a note about something maybe being down here.”

“Even then,” Emma propped her chin on her palm. “Why would he come down alone? And so quickly? It would have had to been either a sudden discovery, or something he was told about.”

“He could have been reviewing tapes—didn’t the security cameras get updated last month?” Sarah huffed and sat up, getting more annoyed at the lack of a logical answer. “They cover the stairs and the elevators.”

“They don’t work down here, though.” Michael moved his tugging to another curl with a frown. He took to running his thumb along the edge of a stack of sticky notes. “And he came down without security, or even calling ahead. I can’t imagine he thought it was an intruder and went in himself—I mean he’s not really intimidating. Well, I don’t _think_ he is?”

“Again, the answer’s probably something out of the Twilight Zone. The new, bad ones.” Eric almost didn’t take Sarah’s eye-rolling personally on the last bit. “Watch, the person probably got thrown through reality by a leitner or something that came _out_ of a leitner.”

“Why would it be a _leitner_ , Eric?”

“Because, Emma, it would make me hate this place even more than I already do. Just a touch more reason to hate working here.”

“You’ve hated working here for thirty years, Eric.” She sighed through her nose and polished off her tea. “Besides, if it were a Leitner he’d have brought someone from artifact storage.”

“So,” Michael drummed his fingers against his stack of graphs, with an expression that could best be described as pinched. “All ideas point at not comforting! Great!”

Emma nodded. “Quite.”

Yeah, that was about par for the course.

* * *

The wonderful thing about having a hospital not terribly far from the Institute was that Elias didn’t have to keep an eye _too_ far out to keep his newest acquisition in line of sight. The terrible thing about it was that he deeply wanted to go crack into said acquisition like he was back in university, sneaking into the anatomy room at midnight before someone realized a cadaver was missing from the cemetery. Well, at the time, he supposed, _another_ cadaver.

The price one must pay for satiating curiosity, he supposed.

It was almost trivially easy to secure April a bed at the hospital—his artifact team being frequent fliers in the A&E ward meant the staff was well aware that strange things just _happened_ at the institute and the fewer questions asked the better. So long as he could assure the admitting clerk that they weren’t going to burn the place down around them, they could be filed away under the institute’s heading.

And, so long as nothing tried to sneak past him, there would be nothing short of their own health to deny him all the time in the world. It seemed to be a credible threat to his study, if what he could Know about them was to be believed—and he hadn’t been wrong yet.

It was not so much that April had collected so many marks—he’d seen _that_ before, and even learned the effects of steeping yourself too long in the energetic leavings of the powers. From the late Fiona Law and Albrecht von Closen, respectively. Even Sarah, young and courageous, was racking them up, but surely didn’t have a shelf life much longer than any other assistant. No, it was that it was taking so long for them to die from it. Fiona had continued her miserable existence until death was physically denied to her—a pity he couldn’t see inside the Buried, it would be a wonderful thing to know just how fast someone lost their mind inside. Still, the fact she could be touched by so many things and survive simply by being no fun to kill was a delightful discovery. Albrecht was consumed by the Eye just as much as Elias himself had gained from it—though he regretted never being strongly aligned enough while Albrecht still lived to truly know if he was marked, or simply sold himself too far, in too many directions. It could, he granted, simply have been the inability to hold himself back a bit that caused his inevitable disease and death. After all, Elias had survived giving himself over just fine—well, technically.

But in April, there was a mystery. A feat of survival that was either through cunning, or more likely sheer dumb luck. He wasn’t sure which hypothesis was more entertaining.

They were, at his count, festering with no less than eight marks. Eight perfect impressions on their bones, on their soul—if such a thing could exist. Whatever dwelt inside the delicate cage of their ribs and the fragile crown of their skull, at any rate. Specifics and details he could work out later, but for now—because he still had to attend to the month’s expenses—he could bide his time. Bide his time and scrounge through his office for a notebook or four to fill with theories and observations. It felt quite like he was awaiting the Christmas goose to be delivered, and the baker happened to be terribly disjointed and drove people mad when looked at directly. He’d never finished an expense report faster.


	9. G54: Fast Talks on Curiosity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not control the speed of the hyperfixation, lets GO
> 
> Warnings for this chapter include: Elias's whole deal, just really so much slime, talk of harm done to april, super unhealthy weight loss and concern about it, anxiety

**Observations on one April Idony May, age 18. Recorded by Elias Bouchard of the Magnus Institute, London. Observation begins on 22 May 2002.**

**Remarks upon the physical state of subject:**

The subject is currently sleeping off several injuries, some major and some minor. They sport a broken nose and numerous bruises to the bones of their face. Their right pinkie finger has been dislocated, and the skin over the second and third knuckles is split with moderate healing. Their left palm is lacerated, with more superficial wounds on the inside of their fingers. Nails on both hands are torn and the beds bruised. The neck has sustained trauma, resulting in bruising and a great unsettling of the musculature. Upon admittance, subject was bleeding from the ears and has since stopped. Eardrums appear in tact, though function is currently unknown. Abdominal injuries include more bruising, in addition to light burning in branching patterns distinct from their stretch marks. Similar issues prevail in the legs as well, with great damage done to the right knee and left ankle. Miscellaneous wounds consistent with the subject’s file are present as well, though their healing stage was apparently slowed by stress of the subject. Systemically, they are suffering from the after effects of dehydration and starvation consistent with being denied either substance for at least a week, consistent with both the time frame of their disappearance and the Distortions’ apparent dislike of an extended hunt—though the prolonged nature of their exposure feels as though they gave it some indigestion.

Frankly, I would be thrilled to know what happens physically and mentally to a person subjected to the Distortion for so long. If things go my way, they will recover their faculties along with their consciousness as they are re-hydrated. In terms of what I can glean from their body as of now, I feel safe in the assumption that the vast majority of the wounds the subject has sustained were from their altercation with agents of the Stranger before they were taken. I feel comfortable with the idea that they perhaps twisted their ankle running from the Distortion, or in some madness fueled delirium. I am unsure of the origin of the burns, but they’re not from heat as far as the nurses can surmise. Caustic, perhaps? Chemical agents from the Strangers? Time will tell.

Complications are as expected, though the subject has also contracted a form of infection that I suspect is from the hospital itself. I plan to monitor and press for more directed treatment if necessary. I have prepared contingencies on the off chance the infection turns out to be less mundane in nature.

**Remarks upon the metaphysical state of the subject:**

Upon first glance, I had identified eight marks on the mind of April May, and I stand firm in my accounting of them. However, there is an odd film of interaction that—when I had initially set to a longer inspection—I almost mistook for more.

Spiraling madness is sunk deep in their mind, almost absurdly so. Knowing they have history of hallucination and assorted mental illness, it doesn’t surprise me at all to know that the Distortion happily targeted them. There is, of course, a lighter film over top it all that comes from being in it’s hallways—a sort of supernatural enzyme from deep inside it’s guts, perhaps? The substance still slowly digesting them outside of the entity, wearing slowly at the victim regardless. I do have to wonder, then, if it delivered them to me as a taunt—the Distortion having hidden something inside them as a trap, or just started me on a track to understanding only to use them as a red herring. I suppose, unfortunately, I will have to wait and see.

The next strongest mark, of course, is the obfuscating scent of the Stranger—oddly it still reeks of clove, given how they’ve moved to tobacco in modern times. _Something_ has to overpower the innate human ability to sniff out what doesn’t belong, I suppose. It settles primarily around their throat, in ten little pinpricks where blood was once drawn. It’s a deep one, scored ever bolder by rumination and repetition. There is little surprising about it, and as such is rather unremarkable.

What _is_ remarkable, however, is the mark outlined in grim resignation that doesn’t quite strike true that sits across their left bicep. From what I know of their statements, I’m truthfully quite surprised that it wasn’t simply an extended portion of the Stranger. No, it sits in the twitching muscle of their upper arm, a festering reminder that they are simply… meat. A link in a food chain they can neither fully comprehend, nor see the top of. I have to say I had not expected the Flesh to be present, though with their history it makes sense. Interesting that the Stranger inflicted the wound that drove it to the bone, even though it was etched deeper with later thought. I will have to research that—if the mark is more dependent upon how one interprets the encounter, rather than what power is actually encountered. Or, perhaps, it was the location the mark was received? Perhaps it is both?

This may explain why, in the case of the feather thin wisp across the back of their neck, there is… a neat divide may be being too charitable. Begrudging armistice, perhaps? A jagged, billowed impression of a breath that was not and could not be, split between the inky wetness of the Dark, and the sharp adrenaline of prey before the Hunt. Ironically, the mark of darkness is _lighter_ than the Hunt, possibly due to—ah, how did they phrase it? “I wasn’t afraid of the dark, I was afraid of what might be in it”?

Not terribly far from Maxwell’s philosophy on the situation, proselytizing and zealotry aside.

It’s there, sunk to the bone, but not the soul—likely because they couldn’t _know_ what it was. It would seem that the dark was almost a _challenge_ to puzzle their way through instead of its own menace. Always holding the possibility of a monster that wanted to devour them, but the darkness itself serves simply as set dressing. Hunt didn’t take much work, I imagine—the shadow had come for them at a young age, and lifelong fears are much easier to muster in youth. It is, thus far, the most pedestrian of their rogues gallery: a primal fear that lights up all the primitive parts of the mind. I’m half convinced that it’s tied to the fear present in the Flesh’s mark, if only due to the similarities of purpose. Honestly, I’m rather disappointed that someone who has survived so long has such a base shortcoming, but it can’t be helped. People for whom death is a pressing concern _would_ find those fears pressing, I suppose.

The last few fears are—while not the clearest—certainly the most pervasive.

Slaughter, unsurprisingly, has a place in their violence ruined body. Worryingly it is, quite literally, in their blood. It brings to mind silt resting at the bottom of a culvert between rainstorms, present and hard to ignore, but not _active_. Adding to my puzzlement, it is… I hesitate to use the world passive, because it feels both incorrect but apt. I cannot tell if the festered influence in their veins is part of the mark, or simply part of it’s effects, but I can tell separating it from my identification of said mark is unhelpful at best. It seeps all the way through them like a cancerous growth, or even simply an aggressively invasive plant. Discounting possible interaction with the Spiral’s influence making my initial observations inaccurate, it’s possible that their mark is simply so deep it has become part of their very being. If I had to hazard a guess on where it actually was, the best I could do would be to center it around the head. The most visible concentration is present in their ear canals, though I am unsure if this is from the previously mentioned bleeding or something else. If they are aware of it, I imagine the banging of war drums battle tinnitus for their attention.

Had I not looked into Delano and Shelley’s little adventure to America, I would simply have assumed they were used to hearing enough threats that they, in turn, assumed one was coming at all times. Prolonged exposure can generate a mark as surely as a single isolated event, and it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a scenario where they were bullied as a child and—turning themselves to violence to survive—fell to the paranoia of it all. From their statements, this wouldn’t be terribly far fetched.

This might, should they recover properly enough to answer my questions, still be correct.

However, it runs far too deep to simply be paranoia. It is an oddly passive sort of acceptance that sits inside them, the total understanding that they are going to harm other people and be harmed. Perhaps the unnerving nature of the father wore off on them—from the information I can glean from observation and what Delano inferred, he seems to have been a soldier of some kind. I will need to look into his history, see if he brought something home with him from whatever war he steeped himself in.

How exciting, that prospect!The idea of a marked victim’s entanglements snaring their progeny, passively like background radiation! If that’s the case, I will need to remember to keep track of the subjects younger brother, June. He seems remarkably compassionate for someone possibly touched by slaughter, but I may well find something in the comparison. If it’s simply a matter of immersion, I may be able to find similar traits in their mother as well. I wonder if a large enough concentration of it could leech outward into surrounding individuals.

That said, I cannot reconcile the fact that they are… remarkably subdued for being touched by slaughter. I will have to research this as well—passivity and the Slaughter don’t terribly mix. Though, one supposes if war feeds it, if a soldier following orders feeds it, then I suppose a radical enough acceptance of it early on in life would be more than enough to keep it there. Still, their file isn’t consistent with other people either devoted to Slaughter—insomuch as one can be—nor people under the influence of it. Not enough random violence, nor a strange pride in it. In fact, the shame present in their statement about the Stranger’s skinning house is almost antithetical. Once more I must consider that the Distortion is throwing off my observation, but I do not believe that to be totally the case.

Perhaps, and now I am withing the realm of total speculation, it is one of their other marks. I could see one of the other, stronger but less wide ranging marks, tempering it some and forcing patience upon it. Deterring even the supernatural rage that comes with the stench of blood.

That said, I hardly think it is the festering brand of the Desolation across the knuckles of their right hand. I’m eager to learn if they had ruined someone’s life and been horrified, or ruined their own. Perhaps the very threat of it frightened them so. I recall the subject hails from Washington state, and am unsure if the frequent natural disasters and widespread poverty play a part in their development. Questions for later.

The final mark, etched deeply into their eye sockets and forehead like the finest lace, is the mark of the Beholding. If it weren’t for this fact, I would be far less inclined to look deeper than basic curiosity. I do wonder how they came to be marked in this specific manner, though their propensity for, in their words, “staring at things” may have something to do with it. And, of course, those that give statements to the Archivist are marked in a manner of speaking—some connection is forged between the power, the victim, and the Archivist. Some fascinating interconnection of fear and feeding and knowing. Gertrude’s been observing their nightmares for quite some time, now. I can’t, obviously, peer too deeply into that—an eye cannot see within itself for all it can look in a mirror. Thankfully, it takes very little to assume that the paranoia of being watched, even in sleep, has helped to develop this etching.

However, I do not believe this is the extent of the mark.

It is, in several ways, similar to how I imagine others seeking out the Eye without sufficient preparations would end up branding themselves. And I _do_ believe that they sought it out, intentionally or not. Hallmarks of a good follower are all there: the insatiable curiosity, the inability to leave well enough alone. The unshakable idea that, if they know _just_ enough more than their enemies, if they learn one more fact, swallow down one more concept, they will be _safe_. And the fact that they are, if I’m understanding their file correctly, _wrong_. Disastrously so, if I’m being frank.

That said, a full read on their personality and motivations will have to be postponed until they manage consciousness for longer than ten minutes at a time.

Beyond the actual marks solidly in place, I must return to the sort of film of interaction that hangs around them. Were this among my first investigations, I’d almost call it a miasma. As it is, I believe the term membrane is more apt—though I hardly think its keeping much in or out.

The Spiral’s misdirection causes some discomfort in my observation, but I believe I have seen what can be seen until it either wears off or the subject expires. For all the Spiral has distorted the surface, I can still see through to some extent. Beneath the film, a chalky residue floats along their skin, so to speak. The Buried is, as always, a light touch and I wouldn’t be surprised if their continued exposure during house repair had given them the boon of accepting the fear enough to let it linger, but not penetrate. An ongoing acknowledgment of their presence under it’s influence in their birthplace, combined with a grim practicality. I can appreciate this tact. There is, unfortunately, also Corruption sitting like an internal oil slick at time of writing, floating across their mind and looking for a way in. Given the last time they were in hospital they faced several massive infections, it makes sense that—when they can awake enough to process things—they should be afraid of disease.

Most worryingly is the final gossamer overlay belonging to the Web. I do not think it is a full mark, nor is it likely to develop into one—instead I believe the subject has simply come into contact with the Web enough times to pick up some threads. I would not be adverse to the concept that this is what is keeping the impulse of Slaughter in line—it is far easier to control a weapon when you control when it’s armed, after all.

In light of this, I find it doubtful that the subjects survival is anything short of orchestrated. I may yet find some surprise strength of character that simply makes them a good pawn, but until then I stand by this conclusion. To what end I don’t know—is May bait in a trap, so to speak? A new and shiny lure to distract me from some other enterprise? Or, perhaps, they are a test of my deductive ability. Further study is, as always, required. Perhaps upon conversation with the subject, I will find understanding.

**Personal Remarks:**

I believe that May presents me with the unique opportunity to study a victim in the process of being digested. Barnabas was a similarly interesting case study, but I could hardly get a direct viewing without ruining the premise. I suspect the Spiral’s digestive process is more dramatic than the Lonely—that was all wafting fog and slowly forgotten personhood. Beyond the initial death and decay, the Lonely hardly effected the natural processes. I do appreciate the fact that the microbial elements needed to decompose a body exist within the Lonely, and am forced to conclude that it’s domain contains its own version of gut flora and fauna. That said, it occurs to me that I had never thought to inspect the bones on a closer level—they’ve long been bleached and sanitized, but perhaps I can find evidence of the process that decomposed them? I wonder, would that be different than if his bones had been cleaned via beetle or time? Mordechai had, in the Lukas tradition, been steadfastly against explaining anything I didn’t press from him. Unfortunately, he might well have been the sort to deflesh the bones before delivery, if only to render them suitably neutral in terms of humanity. He always _was_ more misanthropic than strictly necessary.

It’s been _so_ long since I’ve had cause to draft so many questions that I cannot instantly answer! I presume my joy at this new avenue of study belongs just as much the Beholding, as is my own. Perhaps I will find myself lucky, and the answers will elude me just long enough to prove enticing. At the very least, the continued observation of this novelty will provide a nice diversion.

I eagerly await the stabilization of their health, so the extraction of observation will be eased some. I am primarily limited by the previously mentioned film at the moment, which I feel is unsurprising. Though now I do wonder if the other entities have the ability to digest a human through time spent in their domain. I will have to look back over Barnabas’ bones once more, on the off chance there is more pitting than I would have paid mind to previous.

* * *

There is a certain level of discomfort that is built into hospital beds as a function of what they are. If they were too soft, chest compression on a failing patient would be impossible. Too hard and it’s not a bed, its a table. They also tend to have not terribly comfortable sheets, as bulk washing and sterilization tends to not be geared for softness any more than boiling water is meant to be comfortable to a scalpel. The pillows are uncomfortable in another sense—their diametric values of softness. Either they were so soft that they may as well not be there, or they were hard enough one may suspect they’d been given a brick.

All this to say that when April did manage to be awake for longer than a few moments, they generally found themselves deeply displeased that they had not, in fact, dreamed the last few… however long it had been. And took the time to bitch about it.

It shouldn’t have surprised them, if they were being honest with themselves. Living through traumatic bullshit and waking up feeling like God personally chewed them up and spit them out wasn’t _new_. It had just been a _grip_ since it happened with regularity, and then it happened a lot in a short time. And now they were laying in a hospital bed, with their most common pastime being trying to determine if they had the energy to get up and go take a piss without asking a nurse for help to the bathroom. Because hospitals tend to be wary of letting someone who’s biological battery is on 2% be unsupervised outside of bed. They all also seemed deeply convinced that they had amnesia. Which was weird, because the only thing they were reasonably sure they’d forgotten was how they ended up in England, where the pair of replacement glasses they found at their bedside had come from, and at what point their migraine started.

The migraine felt more pressing, if they were honest, because migraines tend to feel that way. Thankfully they’d had enough sleep that it wasn’t a full on head-splitting ordeal, but the spaces behind their ears still throbbed if they breathed too hard. The fluids being pumped into them helped some, but their medications being… however long out of their system didn’t help. It certainly didn’t calm their heart when they were lucid enough to process that they had no real way of doing much of anything to remedy that. Sure, they’d told the nurses their prescriptions and the more pressing ones were there that day. It didn’t _help_ that they were quietly wondering how much it was going to cost them, in the end. The migraine didn’t help their problem solving, but it didn’t stop the worrying either.

Their world for a plan of action that didn’t make them panic.

Were they going to pray their VA insurance from their father worked in the UK? Pray they could get the copays deferred until they could get in contact with their family and pray June could talk the family into footing the bill?

They allowed themselves a not-quite-worst-case scenario where they skipped town to Germany and bummed with their half brother’s wife while he was off at war. She was far nicer than their half brother, but she was also raising three kids and probably wouldn’t be able to pass off a plane ticket. The base housing was also not big enough to let them stay there too long, either. _And_ they didn’t speak German. They didn’t even have a passport. Was there an embassy? What would they even _say_ to the people there that wouldn’t cause a whole investigation that could blow back on them if they fucked up a lie? Can’t say kidnapping, because they’ll want more info. Can’t say they got lost on a school trip or something, because they’ll want more info. Can’t say they got on the wrong plane, because _more info_. The whole system had been in security lock down for a _while_ and trying to get around it was probably outside their abilities, so they were probably just stuck in England and racking up debt and—

This was about the time a nurse came in to check on them because their heart rate had _apparently_ spiked out hard enough to send an alert to the nurses station. After a good five minutes of convincing him that they were fine, _really_ , just thinking about the state of things back home, they were left alone again. They tried to calm down, but they ended up just sitting very still with their eyes closed. Thankfully, the IV pump was making it’s rhythmic cycling sound, and their heart eventually matched pace. If they had known what was good for them, they’d have let the sounds numb their head and put them to sleep. Unfortunately, they did not.

Not because they couldn’t use the sleep, any rest would have been a good idea at this point, but sleep was hardly _restful_. The Watcher hadn’t been in their dreams lately, but the eye in the sky had. And some new weirdness they couldn’t really place. It was odd, really. They’d find themselves in that dark, endless neighborhood, knowing the Shadow was somewhere waiting for them to run. In the script, in so much as almost cookie cutter nightmares had one, they would stand still until the overwhelming desire to run made them bolt and then they would be prey. Since they escaped the hallways—they assumed they escaped, anyway—it was mostly like that, but a little to the left. They would look down and find that their limbs were not quite the right size or shape. Their fingers jutting out at odd, improbable angles as they reached for doorknobs and rocks to break windows. They felt much too tall, much too short, and once for a fleeting moment: suddenly much too thin. The Shadow came for them regardless, but it seemed to… well, warp more than usual. It’s inescapable pull at the not-moonlight was tinted, now, with small flashes of color. Watching it tear off their limbs was almost comical to watch, as their skin had taken to being stretched longer and longer before finally tearing with a pop. They didn’t feel their bones dislocating, though it must have happened. Their blood, usually a sludgy black in the twilight, was blue and sometimes gray. In the few times they’ve woken from this version of the dream, their body felt _wrong_.

Well, more wrong than ‘dropped from 230lbs to 207lbs in a week from a spooky hallway of torture’ probably left people.

Logically, losing ten percent of your body weight through that sort of thing means you’re going to be feeling rough. Add in migraine, withdrawals from anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications, plus hormonal medications they were suddenly not taking and they had a fine cocktail of perception hell. Also logically, because this would piss it off, it was the Door’s fault. _Logically_ it was probably mental after effects. Also logically it could also go fuck itself in a fire.

They were only a little bitter about the fact that their ribs were painfully easy to feel, and how thin their arms felt, all while their lower belly was still soft. Alright, they were somewhat bitter about it because of course their traitor of a body decided to eat their muscles before actually tucking into the fat they’d had since they were four. Of course their body threw that baby out with the bathwater.

Alright, maybe they were a lot bitter.

They sat there for a while, breathing with the IV pump, and slowly running their thumbs over their fingers. They were bony, now, but were still the same size they should be. Right amount of bones, the new expected level of pain when their skin pulled against itself with no real layer of fat to cushion. They flexed their toes, making sure the sensations were the right distance from one another. They couldn’t blame their body, really. Starvation and dehydration were explicitly what humans evolved to work around, like anything else. The wiring and internal slop giving orders might have been shoddy, but it got them through their latest stint of bullshit. It survived, and that was enough, even if it had side effects. Once more, they managed to be just enough. They could worry about problems later, right now they would settle for being enough.

They enjoyed this moment of zen for all of five minutes before they heard someone coming down the hall.

They were, from what they’d been able to see on trips to and from the bathroom and testing labs, at the very end of a hallway. The rooms around them were empty, which felt odd all considered. The nurses station was also a good distance away, and nurses only came to change fluid bags and give them small cups of broth to test if their stomach could take oral calories yet.

Well, and see if their heart flipping out was from dehydration, anxiety, or actual heart problems. That wasn’t the point.

In the few days they’d been vaguely lucid, they’d gotten very good at telling the nurses that dealt with them apart. Footstep wise, at least. Henrietta Jones wore soft soled shoes that clicked a bit every few steps because they’d slip off her heel. Simon Thomas seemed to wear exclusively tennis shoes that squeaked when he walked because he dragged his left foot slightly. The attending doctor, Satish Patil, took long and heavy strides that always sounded more off kilter than they actually looked when they watched him walk. This was… different.

There was the carried _shh-shh-bap_ of Henrietta’s shoes, going a bit faster than normal, but there was someone with her. They were walking rather quickly, and the sound of their shoes on the tile was a lot softer. It made their brain itch, like they recognized it, but they couldn’t tell if they actually did or if they’d heard someone with the same type of shoe before. It was frustrating, and thankfully they didn’t have to wait long for the two people to enter their room—though they were careful to keep their eyes closed and their ears open.

“Mr. Bouchard, its like I told you: they’re not fully there yet! They were up for about an hour last night, but I highly doubt they’re ready to talk about whatever mishap happened at your Institute this time. I don’t think they even remember working for you. It’ll take time.”

“I’m quite sure you’re correct, Ms. Jones. That does not change the fact that I care about how my employees—especially ones as young as May here—are getting on. I think the very least I can do is sit with them for a while.” It was exceptionally difficult not to just open their eyes and ask who this man thought they were. Because the name was right, yes, but the last time they checked their employment history consisted of doing filing for a small lumber company who’s owner owed their mom a favor. His voice made their brain itch more, and they were starting to get suspicious. It wasn’t the itch of cotton or even general brainfog. Comfortingly, they determined it was simple ‘I have forgotten something’ tingles. Didn’t help that they still had no earthly clue who he was. “Don’t worry, I promise not to make a peep more noise than necessary.”

“Alright, but if they do wake up while you’re here, please make sure not to tax them with too much conversation. They’ve only just gotten their voice back.”

“Of course.”

There was always something about being alone in a room with someone they didn’t know that made them nervous. Sometimes it was their brain sounding alarm bells before they knew why, and sometimes it was just the fact that they’d have to _maybe_ talk to another human being without coming off like a jackass. It didn’t help matters that this Bouchard character was apparently selling the idea that they work for him—and it had been bought wholesale by the staff here. Whoever it was, he probably had enough social capital to buy his way through that kind of bullshit. All in all, not quite at the alarm bells, but they definitely had a hand on the lever.

To his credit, the man himself didn’t do something like sit directly next to their bed and—they didn’t know, breathe weird at them. In fact, from their rather shaky approximation with their eyes closed, he seemed to be sitting entirely across the room from them. It sounded as though he was shuffling through something and then settling back. There was a beat of silence before they heard a very sharp _click_ followed by a dull whirring sound. Almost like a Walkman, but somehow unsettling. They weren’t sure how, but it felt… expectant as it wormed through their ears. Bouchard, whoever that was, cleared his throat.

“Observations beginning at noon, 25 May 2002. April has determined to, what’s that charming American saying? Play possum? In the hopes of figuring out just who I am through context clues. Admirable in terms of a self imposed challenge, though entirely unnecessary. I must say, I am a tad hurt that they didn’t recall me from our initial meeting—but I won’t hold it against them. They’d only _just_ escaped, after all.” A pause where he very clearly waiting for them to admit they were faking being asleep. Well, they were nothing if not stubborn and contrary. He hummed at about the four minute mark of them staying silent. They hadn’t expected to have to be _that_ contrary, and apparently neither had he. “Very well, we can have this conversation your way—though you’d much rather like to see who’s talking to you, yes? Make sure I have all the requisite facial features?”

Nothing, though they almost twitched at his tone. Angling for something, but the what escaped them. The fact he knew that last bit made their ears tingle, though.

“Right. I presume you’d like to know what’s going on. In case you’ve forgotten, I am Elias Bouchard, head of the Magnus Institute. I had you admitted here after you were dropped rather unceremoniously into my archives by—what did you call it? An evil door? A charming oversimplification, but not an incorrect one. I have been keeping track of your progress, and you should be happy to know that the door has not, in fact, managed to digest you while you’re here. Good job on your durability. Oh, and your family had a run in with your Homer. But that’s information you’ll have to actually speak with me for clarification on, I’m afraid.” They could almost feel the tilt of his head, waiting for them to take the bait. They weighed their options. On one hand, they had no reason to _not_ at least converse with this man. He could be being entirely genuine and simply doing a follow up. On the other, he’d lied about them working for him. And while their brain was a bit shaky at the moment, they were reasonably sure the head of the whole situation probably didn’t have much _good_ reason to go prod at odd people falling through doors. And on the third hand, which was probably a foot, if he was telling the truth about their family having to deal with Homer there was a not insignificant chance their father wouldn’t have been able to kill all of them. Especially because he’d simply shoot them and let the sheriff figure it out. Which didn’t work well with notpeople. Not to mention, Homer being Homer, probably had a bee up his dead ass about losing them again and was probably willing to get revenge on June instead. With a surprisingly heavy sigh for an asthmatic, they opened their eyes and frowned at the face grinning at them. “There you are! Good to see you awake—and, I suppose, to meet you.”

He was a short man, this Elias. Well dressed with straight, white, teeth and well groomed graying hair. He looked deceptively solid, the kind of solid that you cultivate to hide muscle. Unfortunately, he also held himself in much the same way, and was sat with a very deliberate level of slouch. People acting in their body language was a special kind of annoying—it meant they had a good enough grip on physical awareness _and_ finer control of their body. It wasn’t a terrible thing in and of itself—most people they’d grown up with had the skill from avoiding drunken fathers or emotionally volatile mothers. This was different, on an instinctual level, though it took them a second to figure out why. It hit them about the time they noticed his eyes. This was an attempt to be disarming. The effect was rather ruined through a combination of April not being born yesterday, and the look in his eyes. They were the specific kind of gray that car collectors got on new, mostly ugly, sports cars to make them seem stylish. Gunmetal, maybe? It wasn’t important. What _was_ important was that his eyes were piercing in an extremely unsettling way. It was like he was looking through them, evaluating them on criteria they could neither discern or effect. It was terrible and they determined rather quickly that they didn’t like it.

“I suppose I should thank you for not letting me die.” To be fair, that was a better opener than ‘who the fuck are you?’ or ‘whom the fuck do you think you are?’. Frankly there was a long list, but their throat hurt. He seemed unaffected by their inner commentary.

“Yes, I’d think that was appropriate.”

This was followed by a look of smug expectancy. They rumbled a bit at that, a deep uncomfortable sound from their chest. Elias managed to grin wider, eyebrows raising a bit. It was unnerving, but mostly in a way they assumed they made other people feel when they noticed too many things and wanted _answers_. They suddenly understood why people hated it. Great.

“Thank you.” They shifted into a slightly more upright position and only narrowly avoided crossing their arms, mostly because IV’s tend to not like being jostled. To compensate, they simply sat cross-legged and tried not to wince at how sharp their own ankles felt on their calves. The throbbing in their left ankle was steadfastly ignored. So was the ache along their spine, because they were being _focused_ , by god. “Is my family alive?”

“I think I would have said something if they weren’t, April.”

“No you wouldn’t.” They hadn’t meant to growl it, but they would call bullshit when they saw it. He quirked an eyebrow and waited for them to continue. Their fingers twitched. “You used them as a pawn to get me to talk to you, I have literally no reason to think you wouldn’t keep using them.”

“Entirely true.” His grin changed into something a bit easier to process as he took in their answering look of confusion. Not a comforting or friendly look, really, simply a more relaxed one. He gently placed the tape recorder—a slim thing with a silver finish—onto the side table he’d commandeered by his chair. “Tell me, how did you get so good at reading people? Are there tells, or do you just… _know_?”

“Answer my question, Bouchard.” This time, they definitely meant to growl. He looked amused. “My family.”

“Are all as fine as they ever are. I am curious, though, has your father always been like that, or is it a recent development?” They shared a long, rather blank look. “Apologies, I’m simply… well, curious. Trying to piece together your case from only your file… has been riveting. I do hope you’ll forgive the impatience.”

April determined this was the point they couldn’t stand sitting up any longer and punched at the buttons of the bed control until they could lay back and still look at him. He didn’t seem to be lying, which was good. The problem was, then, that he had more information on this interaction than they did and they very much did not like that. Even if he wasn’t outright saying he wanted something from them, it made their mouth itch that they’d have to play conversation to figure it out. Well, if he wanted to play, they might as well.

“People are easy to read. Squirrely is as squirrely does. Same with wildly insane.” They half moved to cross their arms again and eventually settled for drumming their fingers on the bed rail. Really, they had to come up with a better way to feel more centered in on themselves. They changed tactics, as he seemed to be chewing on their answer. “Why’d you put me in the hospital?”

This time he simply shrugged.

“You’d be surprised how hard it is to dispose of a body during the work day.”

They scrunched their face up in disgust at the honesty in his reply. One of those. “Charming.”

“I try.” Another smile, though unnervingly he seemed to have settled into conversation a lot more naturally now. It wasn’t great, what that said about him as a person, but it was better to see it head on. He settled back in his chair, carefully crossing his ankles and tilting his head. They assumed he was getting a better look at them, though they still weren’t sure what for. “Though, yes, you are correct in assuming that I would continue using your family against you… if they were effective beyond your younger brother. As it is, I can keep an eye on them, but have no real mechanism to effect them from here.”

They couldn’t hear anything dishonest there, though there was certainly more than enough annoyance about it. Normally hearing that someone can’t hurt your family is _good_ , but the fact he seemed very convinced of his ability to watch them didn’t help. In fact, if he could work around how paranoid their father was, it might make him even more dangerous. That said, you don’t tell someone that without a good reason.

“And you’re playing your hand here…?”

“Because I believe this whole situation will move forward smoother if you trust me.” Another smile, though this one managed to reach his eyes. It wasn’t genuine, but it reached them. Well, not strictly true—his words were genuine, but the smile was very much an empty gesture. Yet another attempt to seem nonthreatening while he had this conversation. The smile got a touch more genuine as he continued, as if they weren’t giving him the best stink eye they could muster. “You see, in my thirty years at the Institute and six years as head, I have seen many things the world at large cannot explain or begin to even imagine. Monsters stalking the streets, books full of curses, murderous ghosts—and much, much more. We have a whole department for looking into them, another for containing artifacts, and a whole library on everything we’ve found. I’m rather proud of it, in all honesty. The scope of _my_ knowledge, especially, is nearly encyclopedic about the esoteric. What I haven’t seen, really, is someone eek out survival so many times without some form of metaphysical protection. At best, someone can survive two or three encounters on their own. You’ve rather managed to kick the hornets nest, been stung by the whole swarm, and managed not to die. In my experience, you appreciate rarity when you find it.”

If he didn’t seem so convinced by it, they would have noticed the careful couching of the statement sooner. As it was, he was not hard to understand. They were _weird_ and weird was his job. A weird little cockroach. And somehow, that lead to all this. Not a great series of conclusions, but they also knew better than to ignore how he phrased information about the Institute. He was trying to make them curious, and unfortunately it was working. Just a little.

They tried to steel that part of themselves with the reminder that he wanted something.

“So you think I’m weird.”

At this he snorted and looked a bit surprised with himself before nodding, chuckling at himself. He pulled himself fully back upright and sat forward, eyes now focused on them for the first time. It was slightly less unnerving than the disarmingly genuine smile he wore, though it was still uncomfortable.

“Exactly! Fantastically so, in fact.” He waved off their raised eyebrow as if in apology. “Perhaps weird is not the proper word, maybe interesting? It doesn’t really matter, in the end. The point is that it’s hardly a bad thing, for you. In fact my curiosity comes with many benefits.”

It was starting to get annoying that they couldn’t be properly skeptical because of the IV. They flexed their toes and frowned. He seemed more inclined to let them ask questions than to explain further, which set them squarely at a disadvantage. It didn’t help matters that he was very much… it was quite like a biology professor explaining how _fascinating_ a preserved creature was. Which immediately made them imagine that he’d like to do the same thing to them, and that wasn’t a great mental image to have during this sort of discussion.

“Benefits meaning, _what_? Because if the answer is getting dissected and kept around as a specimen, I _will_ find out if I can beat someone to death with an IV in my arm.” They had not intended their wild hare of a comparison to worm into their actual speech. They also had not expected his sheer look of delight to return at the tone they’d used in it. “You could look less pleased about that whole idea.”

He nodded, conceding the point.

“I apologize if my curiosity overwhelms me, as I’ve said: I’ve seen _quite_ a lot. New things don’t come every day.” He took a moment to straighten his suit jacket. “However, I would appreciate it if you avoided trying to harm me. Partially for my own well being, and partially because you would only end up hurting yourself. Which is quite the opposite of what I want.”

“And that would be, what? Figure out why I’m so stubborn? Stick me in a ring of crystals? Wave sage at me? Tie an Ouija board to my back and see who turns up for evil party-line?” They rubbed at the bridge of their nose as Elias clearly tried to not laugh at them more. Great, he was that kind of out there. Just what they needed. “Nothing I’ve run into does anything you can just… record somewhere and leave it.”

“I’m very aware. No, I’m afraid anything like that would have to be on your own time—though if you do pursue it, I would be deeply interested if you could get any of that to work for… well, anything.”

“You already have my file, I don’t know what else you’d want.”

“Time, mostly. Perhaps some more conversation, and in time, mutual understanding.” He crossed his legs again, and sat back. The energy of the conversation took a decidedly more reserved tone and they didn’t like where that could be heading. “I would like to offer you employment at the Institute.”

He didn’t _sound_ like he was fucking with them, but he was definitely fucking with them. The idea that he was being serious was almost as absurd as the situation. April couldn’t help but snort.

“Why? I don’t have a diploma, I don’t live here, and I certainly have no job experience for… whatever you people do. Unless not dying is experience?” He seemed unmoved by their bafflement, awaiting something that looked like an answer. “What would I even _do_?”

“Ostensibly, you would do what you’re told.” He smiled through their answering flat look. “I secure for you a position in the archival department, and you work. We meet as you learn more, and we both put cracks in your personal mystery. Nothing terribly outside of your capability should come up, physically or mentally, unless you go looking for it. I get to learn new information in fields I’m already a master in, and you get to do what you do best: learning things that you probably shouldn’t know. All in the name of keeping you and yours safe, of course.”

They were going to ignore the tiny flash of curiosity in their gut.

“And you get _what_ out of this?”

“Again, time and knowledge. Calling you simply ‘weird’ or ‘interesting’ would be vastly underselling your circumstances. I was being quite sincere when I said I had never encountered someone like you, who had _lived_. And, if I’m correct about your abilities—which, frankly, I believe I am—then I get a rather capable archival assistant.” He nodded to the beeping heart monitor. “Now, before you ask again: this is not a totally one sided arrangement. I can’t have my archival staff living on the street, nor being chased down and deported. That would make it rather hard to keep an eye on your status. Should you agree to taking the job, all of those problems can be solved by this time tomorrow, give or take time for money transfers.”

“ _Sure_.” April didn’t bother hiding their skeptical look. “And if, hypothetically, I said no?”

To say the atmosphere changed inside the room would be incorrect. Physically, nothing changed other than perhaps where the hands on the clock were or the beeping of the heart monitor. No, it was much more an emotional shift, a hardening of his eyes that they felt almost as much as they saw. The beeping on the monitor got just a hair faster.

“Then, as I see it, you would have three options. Option one is you fall on the mercy of your family to get you home. We both know this would be risky, since it would be far cheaper to ignore your calls and pretend you don’t exist anymore. Your mother does love the bottom line so, and your father is halfway there regardless. I’m sure your little brother would be heartbroken about it, but you wouldn’t be able to know either way. You end up in debt and on the street until the government deports you to some other place you don’t know. You then have to live with knowing your parents didn’t care enough to bring you home. Option two is you try to go through proper channels and it takes you years of living in confinement before someone at the embassy is content that you aren’t trying to fool your way onto an American plane. You return to the same scenario. Or, three—and this is really the least ideal for all concerned—I stop keeping an eye on you and let the various creatures that _deeply_ do not like being seen come for you. While you have no shelter, no safety, no possible way to survive it. You die, devoured and alone in a foreign country. But that’s not what you care about, is it? Things would come for you, regardless of who they had to kill on the way. Things that make Homer and the Door look like a light sneeze. Think of how many people must be in London, alone. All the people that would suffer, just because of your decision.”

The rush of blood in their ears, stirred up in indignation, oddly lacked the cold fury that usually came with it. Logically it was because no one was in danger _yet_. No one aside of themselves. Logically, he could be lying—though they highly doubted it. Something deep in their mind said he was being entirely serious. Both in his threat and his predictions. They were momentarily grateful there was nothing in their stomach to get queasy with.

“You could have just said it wasn’t a choice and not wasted both of our times.” They grimaced at his nonchalant shrug. “So, what, I get a little box to sit in while you take notes on which thing gets closest to killing me? Free labor while I try not to die?”

“Not quite. I am, after all, a generous man.”

“Bullshit, but go on.”

The fact that his lips twitched almost back into a smile didn’t help the atmosphere.

“You suffer from nightmares, yes? Hunted by a shadow in the dark, where nothing makes sense and you are watched?”

“How did--”

“Knowing things is what I do. It’s partially why you’re such a curious thing. They’re horrible, aren’t they? Never feels like you sleep well, you wake up screaming from pain that doesn’t seem like it should be as real as it is? How strange it must be for you, so used to enduring, only to be faced with something so much worse.” They kept silent, every muscle painfully tense. “I can make those stop. Working for me comes with one of those previously mentioned protections. Accept my offer and the only nightmares you’ll have to suffer are those of your own creation. No more watcher full of eyes hovering behind you, no more shadow playing by its own rules. Just peaceful sleep, in a peaceful place to call home. Just you and the chance to, for once in your life, be normal.”

Silence stretched between the two of them as April chewed at their lip. It certainly didn’t feel like it was a choice, but it was also extremely tempting for a threat. It was like being thrown into the ocean during a hurricane, and then the only lifeline you come across was being held by your worst enemy. And they were threatening to take a corkscrew to the life raft if you didn’t get in. Not liking this was approximately a light year behind them in terms of how they felt about the situation. By the time they managed to put some words together that might get them somewhere, they had accepted that this was where they were. Unfortunately.

“What happens when you figure out what makes me so special?”

“Then I know.” The infuriating part about his tone was that they could tell he knew they’d accepted being trapped. Not because they were happy with it, but because for all the shit life put them through, it seemed vastly preferable to death or causing the death of others. It didn’t help that he melted right back into that unnerving half-honest way of holding himself once he’d seen them slump against the mattress. “You get to keep your job, I know a thing or two more, and all goes well.”

“Gee, isn’t that swell.”

“Come now, April.” He had the nerve to sound almost hurt. “It’s not going to be all bad. I’m hardly as unpleasant as all that, normally. In fact, I’ve been told I’m rather charming. From your file, I’m told you’re as fond of the classics as I am. Perhaps we can discuss the paranormal’s effect on the development of literature. Oh, and don’t think it would just be me. I’m sure you’ll find fellows at the Institute in no time, starting with the archives. There, you’ll even be among friends. Shelley’s been terribly distraught since you went missing—he’s hardly gotten anything done, the poor thing.”

They squinted hard enough at him that he was half sure their glasses would fall off.

“Did you hire him through Faustian deals too, or do you actually ever do normal interviews?”

This earned another round of chuckling and they deeply wished they didn’t know he was honestly finding them funny. It made their teeth taste weird.

“No, we hired him the usual way. Though we did cover the last half of his degree at a local university.” He seemed to perk up a bit. “We could extend you the same courtesy, though you might have to wait it out a bit. Too many expenditures at once _might_ ruffle a few more feathers than is helpful.”

They stared at him for a solid ten seconds before they realized, yes, he was being entirely honest.

“Who pays for all this? Are you taking the Queen’s checkbook?” They didn’t know what to do when he started fully laughing at them. “I’m seriou—am I going to be doing filing and find the crown jewels? Just being slowly sold off ounce by ounce so you can buy employees?”

“No, no, but let me assure you it’s _far_ more entertaining to imagine our actual donors in the Queen’s Sunday best than… I’m, I’m sorry that—I think I might commission that very thing, just to make him uncomfortable the next time he has to come around for a function. Oh, he’d _hate_ that.” With some great effort, he managed to choke down his amusement and realize they were in fact being serious. “No, nothing like that. The Institute has several… I believe the turn of phrase you’d use would be ‘old money’ benefactors. They understand that, for the continued good of our partnership, one must invest in their employees now and again. That said, I do apologize for the unpleasantness. For as unpleasant the lead up to your decision was, I do want this to be a positive relationship.”

“I haven’t signed anything yet.”

“Are you _trying_ to be difficult, or is this just your personality?”

“Are you extremely bad at acting sincere, or is that just your personality?” They exchanged raised eyebrows. They might be trapped being a spooky science experiment, but that didn’t mean they had to be polite about it. “I’m going to sign the damn paper, alright. Don’t make me a devil’s deal and then act like I should be happy about it.”

“Fair point.” He hummed and adjusted his jacket sleeves. The air seemed to settle a bit and it was back to the slightly formal feeling of before. “I can have the paperwork here tonight. If you’re not awake, you can always get to it in the morning. There are only a small selection of flats open near the Institute, so I’ll take the liberty of printing off some real estate listings for them and include them in the file.”

The practical sincerity in the last sentence stuck with them and they tried to find any lie in it. He seemed to be waiting for follow up questions and, well, at this point they had no reason not to ask.

“No strange little boxes next to a warehouse half a city away? I get to choose?” They very much wanted to wheedle him about it, but they were again at a disadvantage. “Why?”

“I hardly need to control where you live, April.” He almost looked annoyed that they needed this to be explained. “I want to observe your interactions with the esoteric and supernatural, not critique your sense of architecture and decor.”

“Huh.”

“I _did_ say I was a generous man.”

“And you were lying.”

“Yes, fine.” He sighed and shook his head. “But I did _say_ it.”

“Fine, sure. Can there be a brief rundown of the boogeymen that are _actually_ after me, though? Like, either after I sign or in the folder? If I’m going to be knee deep in the ghoul swamp, I might as well know the local fauna.” They were certainly not asking because they had determined to make the most of sudden employment and resources. They were also certainly not asking because they were hit solidly with the realization that, comparatively, they likely knew nothing and were likely to be a liability. They also didn’t expect Elias to look as keen on their question as he did. He’d half reached for the recorder when they’d started the statement, and seemed to be waiting to end the recording once they were done. April wasn’t sure how they felt about _that_ , but it was a problem for when they had energy. “Are they fauna? Vegetable, mineral?”

Chuckling to himself once more, he stood and scooped up the recorder.

“I would _love_ to see what a mineral creature would look like, but no—they’re _usually_ fauna. I’ll see what I can do to get you a primer, just enough to keep you dangerous, though the rest you’ll need to do on your own.” He pressed the stop button and the slow whine of the tape faded, before it disappeared into his jacket pocket. “Do try to get some rest before I return, though, April. I’m excited to discuss your encounters.”

And then he was gone, on his leisurely stroll back out into whatever version of the world he inhabited. That they both now inhabited, or would as soon as the paperwork showed up, they corrected. They managed to make themselves relax and glared up at the ceiling, determined to work through the implications before they fell asleep again.

They stilled blamed the door. Logically.


	10. G60: Curiosity, cats, and other vaguely related things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got super sick, am still super sick, but also physically incapable of not writing words. IT's a problem.  
> Also a short chapter but i think i get a pass on this one.
> 
> No real warnings for this chapter, aside of the terrifying knowledge of how monotonous a starvation patient's recovery meals are initially. Just, just so much Ensure and scrambled eggs. And Peanut Butter.

April,

I would like to begin this primer with what I could very well call the creed of the Institute: We watch and we learn. Our role, if it is to be said we have one in the grand scheme of things, is to observe the happenings of the world and record them. We are not paranormal investigators, fumbling around dark rooms with microphones and energy detectors. Neither, I should stress, are we simply a collection of eccentrics comparing ghost stories. We are, at the very end of the day, dedicated to revealing and cataloging the unknown.   
While we do, to no small academic acclaim, investigate and apply research to such occurrences when possible—we do not seek to put an end to them. We do not preform exorcisms, or banishing, nor do we take it upon ourselves to act upon accounts of the supernatural. We do, of course, contact law enforcement in the event of illegal happenings coming to light within statements when necessary. However, direct interference is to be avoided if at all possible. This might prove difficult for you, given as you seem to be to action.

I advise you to keep this directive in mind at all times, and only deviate from this core tenet when directly ordered to do so. I suspect you will need to meet the Archivist in person to fully understand the possibility of such an order, and just why I warn you away from too much intervention.

Principals aside, it would hardly do for you to get yourself killed before we can work out your mystery. While I have taken steps to ensure that the level of safety provided will hinge on your discretion, I feel it would be uncharitable to not warn you of the unofficial dangers of the position. There are elements you will be working with that may seek to use you to their own ends. Given your aptitude for reading others, I have no doubt you’ll have figured out to whom I am referring shortly after starting. I would also caution you from appearing disposable or easily lead. The reason for this, too, should be easy for you to surmise.

Now that the formalities are out of the way, we can discuss what you asked for. The local metaphysical “fauna” as you put it, are great in number and variety. To cover it all would both take far more time than I have to write this missive, and would do you the disservice of not letting you learn about it yourself. It will have to suffice to simply know that there are more things going bump in the night than you could possibly imagine at the moment. And scores more that make no sound at all.

Normally, I would allow you to research everything for yourself. However, I am a man of my word. I will do my best to educate you somewhat on the basics to do with the terrors you have encountered, and enough extra to keep you viable.

What you call notpeople—your Homer, the faceless doll in the butchers shop, and the things making them—are not so creatively named in actuality. They are, in terms we would use, Strangers. Much simpler and much more apt, I feel. They and things like them, thrive on being just outside the boundaries of what feels right, what humanity recognizes as usual and correct. They are the residents and creators of the uncanny valley, so to speak. They are usually, as you have no doubt concluded, things wearing people or imitating them for their own ends. They are skilled liars and rather capable in terms of practical illusions, making their little acts very difficult for the unobservant to see through. Thankfully, you seem keen enough to know when such a simple deception is being placed before you—we will have to discuss if this applies to all of the Strangers you may meet, or simply the ones you’ve traded blows with. I look forward to determining if your intuition stems from instinct or simple observation. The Strangers are prevalent in our reports, though hardly enough to be much of a pressing concern for you at the moment. Like human beings, the vast majority of them seem bound by the laws of physics, and need to physically travel from one place to another. From your statements, I’m given to understand that you’re rather adept at using this little fact against them. While it is certainly possible that one may cause issues for you, it is rather unlikely it will be one you’ve met before. I would advise that you continue your standard level of paranoia. Helps one keep vigilant.

Second, of course, is the shadow you managed to pick up in childhood. It is a hunter for the dark, a rather base and unbecoming subcategory of creature. Think of it as literally as possible: it is very literally darkness and it hunts. While it doesn’t seem to be beholden to natural laws, and certainly cannot be kept at bay by something as mundane as a locked door or violence, it does follow its own rule set. As you observed in your statement on the subject, it tends to avoid motion if it’s query can see it—though in the interest of clarity, I will agree with your assumption that the shadow does so to taunt it’s prey. That said, I hesitate to assume that it is incapable of motion when being observed, and not simply averse to it. We can discuss our theories on why at some later date, though I find your assertion that it simply enjoys a feeling of prolonged dread highly likely. The baseline fear of perceiving the creature is enough to allow it the continued pleasure of the chase—something that can only fully begin once it’s prey flees from it.

I must commend you on avoiding being consumed for so long, even from a creature such as this. Most people interacting with the dark—once more not terribly creative in nomenclature, but simple—tend to give into the terror of either not understanding or not perceiving. Ostensibly, the fact you rely so heavily on what you can see and know may well have doomed you, and yet you have managed. You also avoided the naive comfort of trinkets or superstition to fend it off, which may have played into your survival as well.

I digress.

While the shadow is hardly required to move as you or I, it doesn’t seem capable of teleportation. That is to say, you should sleep better knowing that it can’t appear here without some work. Not to say that it would be impossible—night falls across the world inevitably, and it seems to move quite well in said darkness—but I do hope it’s hardship in following you will be of some consolation. Personally, I find that knowing my enemies will have the most difficult time possible to be exceptionally comforting.

The last subject I will cover for you is one I am actually rather interested in: the door. While simply calling it as it appears is not incorrect, it falls prey to oversimplification. The door is not, as I’m sure you know, simply a door. It is a creature that delights in perverting ones perception. Feeding on doubt and confusion, it stalks the vulnerable until they are lured into it’s depths. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you terribly much more about it in that regard, given your extensive tenure with it. We term it the Distortion, for obvious reasons. While it is certainly strange, and capable of making the world seem foreign, it is not a Stranger. It is far too expansive and unpredictable for that, unfortunately. I’m afraid that I don’t know what occurs inside of it’s hallways, though I’m sure you’ve become quite the expert in its inner workings—yet another topic of conversation for later. What I can expound upon, however, is that it is not bound to the simple shape of a door. It appears to be either able to leave itself to hunt, or simply take other forms. Obviously, it follows no rhyme or reason in its behavior aside of feeding on unease. Given it rather unceremoniously regurgitated you into the archives, I don’t think I need to tell you that it can be wherever it chooses.

That said, it will either consume you the next time you pass through an unfamiliar door—something I would hope you would see coming—or it has no pressing plan to do so. You should remain vigilant regardless, as you seem to attract beings intent on playing with their dinner.

Beyond the above, I would warn you of the far more mundane side of this whole enterprise. Once you sign the contract, you will become inextricably bound up in the business of the esoteric and unusual. This is both a wonderful opportunity I have given you, and exactly the kind of dangerous work that you assumed you were bound for. What I mean to say, is that there are likewise other people playing in this sandbox for far less noble reasons than knowledge and understanding. I’m sure someone like you is exceptionally aware that humanity is almost always as dangerous as the monsters. I expect nothing less than perfect vigilance in keeping yourself and by extension, the institute, from these elements.

I’m sure knowing that people are also out to get you is hardly a surprise.

In the interest of providing a more well rounded introduction into this new world of ours, I have drafted a list of relevant materials for you to appraise yourself of as soon as is possible.

I will have some of the lighter books on the supernatural delivered to your hospital room once I retrieve your paperwork, to keep you busy until your release. At such point you are discharged, I will have the weightier books delivered to the flat you decide upon, as I doubt you’ll have the strength to join me at the Institute immediately. To give you time to both adjust to your new home, and your new physical normal, I will grant you a week grace period between moving in and coming to work. This will both give you time to catch up to speed, give you further context, and allow for an easier transition. You will be expected to be at least partially finished with them by the time you begin work properly. Think of it as your orientation.

The attached file contains your employment contract, which covers the obvious as well as the finer details of our arrangement. As discussed, I will cover your lodging and the legal side of things. It also contains the previously mentioned listings, as well as request forms for several mobility aids that you may find useful. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the benefits of a well measured cane.

I will be by tomorrow to collect the paperwork and discuss further research topics. Please be prepared to discuss any working theories you may have, and questions regarding the contents of this file, so I may provide us both with the relevant reading material.

Elias Bouchard

Head of the Magnus Institute, London

_Audio. Vigilo. Opperior._

* * *

April looked flatly between the three pages of Bouchard’s primer, and the half inch stack of paperwork that had come with it. They then had to carefully blank their expression, because frowning was starting to hurt.

They weren’t actually surprised that Elias had basically quoted their own information back at them—though it certainly didn’t make them happy. The more annoying bit of it was that they weren’t entirely sure if Robinson and Shelley had lied to them about having said information when they’d called. Elias lying would, after all, be a far simpler conclusion.  
On one hand, Shelley hadn’t been able to tell them anything new when they’d spoken on the phone and he didn’t strike them as a liar. Granted, you don’t need to lie to not be helpful, even with the best intentions. And it’s not a lie to say you don’t know something if you truly don’t know it. If it was like Elias said and what they had experienced was novel, but not unique, it would make sense the bulk of information that could directly correlate would be scant at best. Scant leads means he couldn’t have exactly punched their statement into supernatural google and told them what was going on. On the other hand, Elias was clearly baiting them to ask follow up questions and the wording felt like he was being… not misleading, though he could have made it up wholesale. The wording felt very much like he was making a token gesture and hoping that it would invite _discussion._ The kind of discussion that is more of a transaction than conversation. This could either mean he was honestly unsure what was going on, and by extension the Institute was, _or…_

Or it could mean this was the sort of situation where the head honcho has all the information and it’s passed out, piecemeal, to the people below him. Given literally everything about how Elias Bouchard existed as a person, this seemed nauseatingly likely.

April idly smacked their hand over the paperwork, starting up a more bass toned version of their tapping. It didn’t help them focus enough to keep reading through it, but it made them feel slightly better. Overwhelming would be an understatement of the situation, but at least paperwork they understood. Words on paper, saying things that had meaning. That meaning might be several miles to the left of what they were versed in, generally, but it was something that made sense. It was just terribly _mundane_.

Logically they understood the following pages that boiled down to what looked like your standard ‘work here and get money to not starve to death’ contract, and that there was a solid five pages outlining employment benefits that included healthcare and dental. It was very reasonable that there was also what looked like a rent agreement with blanks left for details yet to be decided, and that the listings were clipped to it. Even the apartment pages looked more like something they’d have found in the community college printer, than part of a ‘welcome to Cthulhu club’ pack. There wasn’t even a mention of the supernatural aside of a brief comment in the contract, tucked neatly in the mission statement that simply said that was what the Institute researched.

This made a certain amount of sense; you can’t just slap up a sign saying you’re looking into elder gods or something, and then expect to be taken seriously. You can, however, treat the idea of things going bump in the night as a series of observations, and effectively shove it under a microscope until it looks like science. Once that happened, and once you put together enough of something that looked like data, it was less likely to be scoffed at. Which, they assumed, was what the Institute had done. If Elias was being even a fraction of the way honest about what he’d told them, then he’d made a career out of finding strange things and staring sense into them. He also appeared to be the kind of man that either tells someone everything, nothing, or almost nothing depending entirely upon what he can get in return. Another thing that made a certain amount of sense. People there _for_ the mundane work get the mundane treatment. They were a thing to be stared at, while they did the mundane work. It made sense that they got the bare minimum information.

And they absolutely hated how it made sense.

It wasn’t that they were being denied information—if Elias really was a man of his word, they could learn on their own, in time. I _f they had to._ Even if he wasn’t, they’d be in the archives, which were bound to be full of information on spooky things. Vintage spooky thing information, even. Possibly with annotations. That just meant a research project to go with any labeling and organizing they had to do as part of their new job.

It wasn’t even that he clearly wanted to _watch_ as they learned and puzzled things out, instead of sharing with the class. No, they were entirely sure that he was the kind of man that either viewed himself as the professor in that sort of situation, or at the very least the masters student that was mostly there to make their transcript look pretty. They could, at the very worst, work with that. Being the lone high school student pulling double duty in most of their college courses had made learning while being stared at routine. They could even swing writing papers for him, if he was so inclined to ask. You needed research for most papers, so it still fit their end.

It just seemed oddly _usual_. Like they’d lucked into a very cushy, but super suspicious job right out of school, instead of… well this. Looking at the paperwork, it would very much seem normal—just mundane and boring business. It was that it _was_ so normal. There were no secret symbols on the contract paper that appeared when held to a lamp. No strange Latin subscript at the very end, or wedged between lines. No weird wording that could be interpreted as ‘we own your soul now’. Even the short summary of what they’d be expected to do in the archives was painfully mundane. It sat oddly in their head, that there _wasn’t_ something like that in there.

The way Elias had talked, working for the institute would give them some form of protection—however much they decided to trust that, anyway. They were _tired_ , not stupid. Did something magically happen once they’d signed? Were they supposed to use blood? Would Elias, they didn’t know, have some sort of spell to cast on them once he confirmed they signed on? Nothing said anything to that effect and it made them fidget. It occurred to them, slowly, that they were upset there wasn’t _more_. The normalcy they could put aside as a cover, some smoke screen so the world at large didn’t think it was weird he was hiring a random teenager from another country. The problem was that they didn’t find some clue that lead to a secret code, or some hidden double print that contained the real contract. There was just exactly what they thought it was. They weren’t sure what to make of that, but it was either very good or very bad.

They were interrupted by Doctor Patil coming in for his end of shift check-in. They weren’t sure if it was actually the end of his shift, but he tended to chat casually about going home to his family after they’d covered health things. It felt like something someone did before going home. Given their situation, the only real updates tended to be about whether they were allowed to try eating scrambled eggs _and_ peanut butter interchangeably. Sometimes they even got mashed potatoes along side their unnamed nutrient drink. It probably had a name, but April couldn’t find themselves caring after how much they had to drink once they could keep oral calories down. All they cared to know was that the vanilla flavor tasted like chalk, and the chocolate tasted like the diet shakes their mother used to force on them as a kid. They attempted to not fidget as they tried to focus in on what the doctor was actually saying.

“How are we, April?” Dr. Patil always looked like he was smiling specifically for whoever he was looking at. Always a genuine smile, with no artifice or lie. Just a warm, caring man that was a bit clumsy with their pronouns on occasion, though he swore he was saving up hard candy each time he misspoke. Supposedly he was going to give it to them when they were going to be released, to make up for it. He hadn’t seemed to have been lying about it, which was both unnerving and pleasant, if they were being honest. In response to his question, they managed what they assumed was a smile. This seemed to pass muster, because he nodded. “I’m told Mr. Bouchard came to check on you again. He didn’t tire you out, I hope?”

They tilted their head slightly and frowned a bit, letting their frustration with the paperwork leak into their posture.

“No, I think I’ll manage.” A pause to slowly knit their brows together, as if thinking very, very hard. “Again?”

He looked sympathetic, as he always did whenever they had no earthly clue what the fuck anyone was talking about. They kept the look up, as if trying to force the information out of their own head. The small tugging feeling of all the skin on their face was far less into this exceptionally low stakes play than they were.

“Yes, he’s been in several times. I had thought I heard him speaking to you, though if you don’t remember, I might have to remind him you’re simply _tired_ and not in a coma.” It was said like a joke, and was probably meant to transition to the actual medical items on the agenda. To April it was a cue that prodding for more information would probably be a bad idea—not that the good doctor was sending that signal. No, there’s just a point at which fishing for information gets very obvious, and they didn’t want to deal with more implications that they had amnesia.

They instead spent Patil’s pleasant chatting about his family—an attempt to be personable and also probably to jog some of their memory—pondering what it could mean for Elias to have visited often enough that the doctor noticed. They’d been in just enough hospitals for just long enough to that an attending doctor doesn’t just… hang around. Either the nurses told him—which implies its significant enough to warrant gossiping about—or he’d spent enough time in their room that he’d seen him. The fact there had been speaking, in addition to Elias’ talking into a tape recorder like a coroner when he caught them pretending to be asleep, probably said something very bad. They weren’t sure _what_ , but it could honestly have been anything from honest curiosity being committed to tape, to him cursing them or something.

They had to make a concentrated effort to keep from squinting as they pondered the possibility of curses being a real, actual thing. They then had to make a second, larger concentrated effort to look interested in what the doctor was saying about their upcoming meal plan until he left. Partially because Elias’ comment about cursed books pointing directly to curses being a real thing. Mostly, however, because, rather abruptly, they realized that—while he might not answer completely, Elias didn’t seem eager to directly lie to them. Omit information, was comfortable in manipulation, and totally capable of doing so. Just not, apparently, overly interested in it. _And he had invited an open line of questioning_. He had, essentially, said that he wouldn’t give them specifics. But he said nothing about the intellectual equivalent of minesweeper. The primer, sparse as it was, had less uncovered part of the board, and had more so highlighted three small tiles they could start from. Even if they allowed for the assumption that he was baiting them into curiosity—to what end they didn’t know, aside of making themselves beholden to him for said information—it was hardly like they had the freedom not to ask. They could, of course, just sign the paperwork and give him the blandest possible responses. Of course they could. It would be exceptionally stupid, because if he had the power to give them all these things, he had the power to take much more away. But they could. They’d made their choice, and in making it had given themselves a box to work within. If they could tell exactly how large that box was, and what lurked outside of it, by asking questions—they were going to ask questions.

Nurse Thomas was happy to provide them a pen and small notebook from the gift shop upon request when he’d brought them dinner. He’d disappeared while they ate, reappearing with a gel pen and a small notebook from the gift shop. With a conspiratorial wink, he said he’d put it on the Institute tab. They’d given him a wry smile in return and a thumbs up, before he retreated squeakily down the hall to the nurses station.

The notebook he’d given them was about the size of their hand, and had absolutely no firmness to it. Some flimsy thing someone picks up to leave short notes on the first few pages, before promptly forgetting about it once they’ve torn the pages out. The paper was patterned in a way that implied you were _supposed_ to use them to write nice little notes to patients. Get well wishes and reminders that you’d be coming back if you stepped out for a moment. The pen was likewise the sort of utensil that people used once in a blue moon, or really just once. It had no grip, just a straight, hard plastic line that they could see the ink through. When they scribbled a bit on a corner to test the flow, they realized it was one of those pens that smelled terrible and didn’t even write well to make up for it. The upshot was that they weren’t going to use it for aesthetics, and hopefully the smell would dissipate before they had to reference the notes.

April had hardly expected to start their tenure at Spooky Incorporated by sitting up into the night, thinking their way around corners, but here they were. Cramping in their hand aside, they soon had several pages full of questions and clarifications. It was almost exciting enough that they could ignore how stiff their joints were after the first few, or how their fingers ached around the pen. They were growing fairly confident that, given some time and enough of a jumping off point, whatever inch Elias could give them would be stretched into a mile. They just had to ask the right questions.

As they finished their tenth page of notes, they set the pen down and shook out their hand. They had more, of course they did, but it hurt and they needed time to think. It didn’t help that they couldn’t shake the feeling, all alone in their hospital room, that they were being watched.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just in case yall worry, my covid test came back negative but my symptoms were not informed. So, still have to put up with me but i'll be slower than usual. 
> 
> Also i do art, check out my art tumblr at https://mokartbox.tumblr.com/


	11. G55: Eldritch Library Card, soul only sort of required.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alt title: It's not that deep, Elias.
> 
> i have transitioned to just being super tired all the time, so things are short, and probably will be for a bit. But writing is being done so yay.
> 
> No content warnings for this chapter aside of meandering contemplation of math and why the distortion is a creep. And Elias realizing he has to talk around his own talking around things. That's mostly so you can point and laugh.

Unfortunately for April’s sense of the dramatic, Elias returned to the hospital while they were trying their best to rest their eyes the next afternoon.

“Trying the same game twice, are we?” He sounded like he was holding back exasperation, which was something they were very familiar with. They cracked an eye and noted the bag he was carrying, though the edges of their vision burned a bit. Waving their free hand, they groped around for their bed control. If they had to look at him, they might as well be comfortable doing it.

“No, repeats only work if they did the first time. Spent too long reading my own notes last night.” He made what they could only assume was a sound of approval as he made his way over to the opposing chair. The canvas bag he’d brought with him barely managed to fit on the side table, and it was amusing to notice how a corner was prodding into Elias’ arm. Small comforts, they supposed. What was in the bag was a bit of a mystery, or it would have been if the top of the bag wasn’t facing them enough to show several book spines ranging from ‘belongs in a mansion somewhere’ to ‘this came from a stoners coffee table’. They rubbed at their eyes in an attempt to get centered back in on the topic of information. “I have questions.”

“I’m sure.”

“First off, though, what was supposed to happen when I signed?”

“Your signature happens, just like every other contract anyone has ever signed.” The bare amusement in his voice shouldn’t have been allowed. “Anything else? I’m on a bit of a schedule today.”

“With the whole spooky shtick, Bouchard. No shit ink gets on paper. Was there supposed to be some spell or something?” At this he chuckled, though it was clear he was doing so to avoid snorting which was annoying in its own way. “What?”

“These things are hardly as flashy as all that, I’m afraid. A simple, mundane contract to the Institute is quite enough.” He seemed deeply amused by their answering scowl. “I assure you, the protections I promised were secured once you signed. We’re researchers, April, not some coven of witches in a cave somewhere.”

“You press-gang me into Spook Inc. and don’t even have the decency to make a production out of it?” Another grin in answer to their deadpan. “Couldn’t even pass me a magic pendant to get me into secret book club?”

“Sadly, I issued the last cursed pendant last week. But, luckily for you, I’ve decided to deliver a good portion of your ‘secret book club’ reading today.” He gestured to the bag and sat back in his chair, looking much too amused with his own joke. “I’m starting you off with the basics—investigations of major hauntings, a few books on demonology, and a few shorter entries on folklore. Nothing dense or terribly groundbreaking, but enough to get your feet wet. I debated giving you a book on the interplay between geometry and the supernatural, but I decided against it.”

They didn’t like the feeling of amusement that followed that, or the expectant look he was giving them. He wanted a question and they hated that they were curious enough to ask.

“And why’s that?”

“I thought you were having a hard enough time without being subjected to mathematics, or several dozen pages on the integration of fractals in arcane contexts.” One part joke, one part trying to make it seem like he omitted it for their benefit. He seemed disappointed when they didn’t react, though only for a moment. “In all seriousness, however, fractals and the Fibonacci sequence have a nasty tendency to attract the Distortion and I felt it prudent to avoid getting it’s attention.”

There it was. Both a nugget of truth and an opening for more questions.

“What draws it in about it? Are you telling me math is a, what did you call it, a ‘perversion of the senses’?” They paused, quirking an eyebrow as the look of amusement returned. “Aside of like, being made up and annoying.”

“What do _you_ think, April?”

“That you could tell me, but you don’t want to?”

He chuckled at that, and idly tugged at his sleeve.  
“Well, yes. Though if you recall, this is supposed to be a conversation, not me answering questions to a brick wall.”

That was, unfortunately, a fair point. It wouldn’t be a great idea to act like they had the leverage to press him too hard, just because they got a good nights sleep for the first time in months. They rubbed at their face and groaned, if only because this was about thirty miles to the left of what questions they actually wanted to discuss. Normally, the mindscrew nature of the door— _the distortion_ , they reminded themselves—would be a good thought experiment to help contextualize the situation. Normally, they also hadn’t been inside it and _normally_ they hadn’t been needing to check how long their bones are because things felt weird now and then. They’d rather _not_ think it out, know the logical end point, and understand it. But this wasn’t about what they’d _like_ to do.

“Other than both math and the distortion are confusing as hell? Uh. Well, you said it feeds off making people nervous—not like going to give a speech or take a test nervous, but like… ‘This does not make sense’ nervous. Knowing something’s fucked up, but not _how_. Makes sense that confusion follows confusion.” They tapped at their notebook as he looked on, expectant. “You also said it messes with perception, and math is very much a thing that can both really help you put something in perspective or confuse you. Large numbers, or infinitely continuing shapes—like the Fibonacci spiral—are hard. They’re hard to conceptualize, let alone understand, and you can’t perceive infinity. Trying to process super large numbers isn’t something a person can physically do, we aren’t made for it. Sure, we have exponents to help, and equations to break it all into manageable pieces, and comparisons. The whole ‘this star is the size of fifty suns’ thing, or measuring things in football fields instead of numbers. All that we know is that we don’t actually know what’s going on there, even if we think we know.”

Their forehead was starting to ache from how hard they were furrowing their brows in thought. The look of sheer delight on Elias’ face didn’t help. Mostly, it didn’t help that they were trying to make this comparison work, because it _felt_ like they were getting close to a conclusion, even if they didn’t want it.

“That covers infinite spirals—no, wait. Math, confusing, numbers hard. Sure okay, but I think—I think more accurately it’s that there’s all the information needed to understand what you physically can _inside_ something like the golden spiral. Fibonacci’s has right angles, the implication that you could definitely understand wherever it goes by just adding up what number came before it—but you have to trust that you’re doing it right. All the parts are there, just like the hallway is there, being exactly what they are. But what they are might not be what you see, and if it _is_ , it might not be what your brain decides to interpret it as. Numbers get too big, too over or underwhelming—i guess negatives? Follow me, here—” They punched at the bed controls so they could sit even more upright, much too invested in making words happen to care for comfort. They needed to be _present_. Elias seemed oddly amused, but they only half noticed. “If it gets too much, your brain either gives up entirely, which is distressing, or you convince yourself that you know what you’re looking at regardless because you don’t want to be uncomfortable. But, somewhere, you know you’re lying to yourself and know you’re confused and aren’t sure how, because trying to find the spot lands you in the same place. That, or it’s the kind of mathematical precision of fractals that fuck with someone, and draw it in, because they’re the same zoomed in or from afar, but how you see them might change as you look at it? Because humans still have monkey brains that really like sticking to our first instinct of looking at things, and realizing we were wrong makes us panic? I don’t know, I didn’t see a lot of math while I was inside.”

They paused, finally noticing the look on his face.

“Or it’s because math is in your head and you can go down a rabbit hole of being very, very, wrong and not notice if you also get the check wrong?” They managed to blank their face to save on too much further scrunching. It didn’t help that he looked like he was watching them run a maze. “Or because simple math people feel confident in, but once it gets bigger they have to write it down and you have to trust yourself to know what you wrote is right? Feel free to tell me if I’m even a little bit close.”

“I wouldn’t say terribly close, but I also wouldn’t say you’re terribly far off either.” He hummed pensively, finally getting around to removing his tape recorder from his jacket pocket and placing it on the bag of books. The sound of it running had gone rather unnoticed until then, and they were at least half sure it was because they were too busy wondering if math could be evil. “As I said, it runs on the idea that your world, what you know to be true and right, is _wrong_. It feeds on the ensuing distress. The idea of bungling a maths problem leading to enough distress to call it in, while fantastically simple, may well be somewhat close. I’m not entirely sure why it’s drawn to mathematics either, though I think understanding would quite defeat the purpose.”

They blinked very, very slowly. “You didn’t even know?”

“If I knew _everything_ , April, we wouldn’t need to have this conversation.” The exasperation aside, he seemed genuinely annoyed by the admission.

There was a span of silence exactly five seconds long.

“Not really living up to the whole ‘encyclopedic knowledge’ thing, Bouchard.” Their deadpan was met with a shrug, and they weren’t sure what else they had expected. They were weird for their involvement with the distortion, enough that information on it warranted—well, this—it would make sense that he didn’t actually know much about it. The good news was that seemed to be a wonderful bargaining chip, or his displeasure at not knowing would be a great sore spot for later. “Fine, math being secretly evil all along aside, I do have questions.”

“I imagined you would, but I only have so much time. I _am_ a busy man, after all. Once you’ve been discharged and our meetings aren’t largely constrained to visiting hours and my lunch break, I’ll answer some of them.” He raised a hand to pacify their very intense squint of dissatisfaction. “I’m aware this must feel exceptionally one sided, and it rather is. However, I will assure you that the books I’m leaving you with are full of answers to at least _some_ of your questions.”

April’s sense of self preservation was about the only thing that kept them from crossing their arms. Instead they settled for a raised eyebrow and crossing their ankles, pointedly ignored the twinge of pain that followed. He didn’t seem to be lying—either there really was useful information in the books, or he felt there was. He also seemed to be watching them pick through his body language, and frowned a bit in what they assumed to be thought.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say you didn’t only take time out of your scheduled to grab paperwork and deliver books. If you could send a lackey to drop the stuff off, you could do it again.” There was a look of deep, deep amusement on his face toward the end. A very barefaced look of ‘I know something you don’t’. It made their fingers itch. “What theory did you want me to have ready for today? Because the only theory I have for the distortion is that it wanted a snack and I gave it indigestion.”

The look of deep amusement was back, though now it was more self satisfied than knowing. Their fingers itched more.

“Well spotted. I was actually rather hoping for—well, I’m not sure how to put this in a way you’re capable of understanding.” Bait. He tapped thoughtfully at the arm of his chair, while he stared a hole in the middle of their face. Fighting the urge to look away, for risk of missing something, they instead started slowly flexing their toes. Removing the energy from one response to another was a great skill of theirs, though their joints popping made it a bit more obvious. Not that his gaze wavered, even at the sound. It almost felt like the bridge of their nose was being slowly set on fire. “In your statement on the Strangers, you mentioned a hole. Did you ever encounter anything aside of your Homer, around the hole? While you were digging?”

April blinked very slowly, trying to find the point of this. Either he was fucking with them, or somehow dirt was also magically evil. His fingers twitched where they rested on the arm of the chair, almost like he was keeping himself from gesturing for them to talk.

“Not that I can remember?” They looked him over once more, trying to find literally any clue. The only thing they were getting was that his focus had shifted through them again. “What, are you going to tell me mole men are real?”

“No. I need you to think very hard, April.” He wasn’t quite at the level of tension he’d reached when listing off how absolutely boned they’d be without him, but it was… something. Suddenly, the burning sensation in their face shifted abruptly to their abdomen and back, leaving a wide swath of discomfort. This was followed rather quickly by a renewed focus on their face. “When did your asthma start? Were the symptoms just there one day, or did something happen to trigger them?”

He seemed even less patient with their considering this time, openly frowning as they studied him. It took way too much self control not to fidget.

“Class hiking trip up a local mountain when I was eleven. Had an attack about half way up and managed to hobble my way back to the school. Got officially diagnosed last year after a lab accident. Sudden onset, though, yeah.” He looked almost… disappointed. “What do asthma and dirt have in common—other than not being great for each other?”

He distractedly retrieved the tape recorder and dropped it into his pocket, not bothering to press the stop button or respond. It didn’t _feel_ like they’d upset him with their answer, but it certainly felt like they’d rained on his parade. This was only half satisfying, because the other half to consider was that their list of issues could involve mole men. They really hoped it wasn’t mole men. Liking the Tremors series was bad enough for their ability to trust anything less than a slab of concrete.

“I thought there would be a connection, but if there isn’t… I wonder…” He stood and relocated the bag of books to the foot of their bed. Up closer, it was exceptionally difficult not to try to move away from him. Ostensibly, he wasn’t doing anything—just looking though them again. It still felt like he was trying to see something that they didn’t have the ability to hide from him, and it was deeply uncomfortable. Not in the way they usually were when close to people they didn’t know terribly well, not in the way of someone looking a little too long at you. It was uncomfortable in the fact that it felt startlingly familiar to the watched feeling they’d had the night before. Less vague, though, all from him. They deeply didn’t want to dwell on what that could mean, at least not while he was standing directly at their bedside. After a moment of April trying desperately not to scrunch up like a cat avoiding being touched, he blinked and cleared his throat. “Terribly sorry, just a mystery I’ve been looking into that you’re… oddly not connected to.”

“Right. Did… did you need the paperwork?” They gestured vaguely to the folder on their side table. He nodded stiffly and flipped through it—relaxing into checking signatures. “I picked an apartment, if I should have picked a cheaper one—”

“You did very well for not having done this before.” The compliment didn’t feel like he was praising them, so much as he was relieved that he wouldn’t have to fix any mistakes. They could have sworn they heard the tape recorder click off as he snapped the folder shut and started toward the door. He paused at the threshold, turning to look through them once more. “I’ll have the pertinent materials delivered as they become available. Have fun with book club.”

With that he disappeared around the corner, taking the bulk of the watched feeling with him. Not all of it, not the odd layer of unease that settled in the night before, but enough to let them breathe a second. They focused on slowly flexing their fingers while they tried to think. While he said more information would be shared after discharge, there was no guarantee that their meetings wouldn’t be just like this. Granted, set either at the institute or in their new apartment. They didn’t much like the idea of the last option, really. Even if he determined to lay out all the information he had, they’d really rather it didn’t happen where they were going to be living. It just felt like his unnerving energy would rub off on the couch or something. Which was terrible for a few reasons, but also because they’d seen the couch in the listing—it was the sort of couch they were pretty sure they’d have been thrown out of a store for sitting on. Be a shame to get weird slime feelings all over it.

The upside, of course, was that they were getting _somewhere_. Even if that somewhere was technically signing up for the most cursed library card possible. And sitting through ten different books that looked like the pages would smell of academic headassery. At least it was headassery about ghosts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im doing my best yall. sorry for the short chapter and have a great day


	12. I21: Practical Efforts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been a bit huh. In my defense i was very very sleepy.   
> Also idk if i accidentally posted the last chapter in the deadzone for ao3, so if you start this one and go "wait what happened" u might wanna jump back one.
> 
> No warnings for this chapter beyond April's self image not being great and possibly the most mundane interpretation of Elias Bastardman's abilities ever devised. 
> 
> Longer chapters coming soon, hopefully

The one good thing to come of Elias Bouchard playing chess with them, was that it put their new apartment between the hospital and the Institute. Well, good in the sense that they wouldn’t have to carry their new belongings halfway across the city. The overall situation remained rather terrible, however, because they still had to carry books and things while their muscles were still working out if they existed. It certainly didn’t help that, once they’d been officially discharged, they were rather immediately faced with a problem they hadn’t really thought about. A creeping sense of unease, separate from the heavy feeling of observation and odd fog of uncertainty. It pressed in alongside the watching, little pinpricks of glances and idle looks as they passed someone.

Initially, they put their general discomfort on the way out of the waiting room down to being in a very unfamiliar place. New faces to check and movements to track while loaded down and vulnerable. Standard paranoia on top of that like a deeply unpleasant sundae, perhaps. Maybe social awkwardness from the fact they were wearing a tracksuit that was much too large for them—it had been a gift from nurse Thomas, who was apparently appalled at the idea of sending them home in paper scrubs in the middle of a wind storm. He’d also framed it like he’d robbed a bank for it, though said bank was his sister and she hadn’t really minded. It was cozy, and they’d been very grateful, but it was painfully obvious that they weren’t who it was sized for. Or maybe it was simply the lingering assumption that everything wasn’t as it seemed—not a terribly far fetched idea for why their stomach was occasionally lurching when they passed someone waiting to be seen for something. The actual answer fell into place as they had exited and awkwardly tried to join the bustle of foot traffic down the sidewalk.

People. The problem was people, and all the evidence they were there.

Sure, paranoia was there—both of mundane dangers and supernatural. Of course it was. But so were the sounds of busy traffic and the press of crowds trying to get where they needed to be. Bright sunlight slicing through the clouds in unpredictable patterns, shuffled around by biting wind. People talking to one another, loud enough to be heard over the ambient sound of the swells of humanity around them. The sounds of movement, of life, echoed up and through the artificial corridor of the looming buildings. The smells weren’t much better; either the hurrying masses with perfumes, colognes, and sweat or the exhaust of cars pressed in by the looming buildings. The smell of food mixed in with it all and created a strange cloying feeling in their nose. It was all compounded by the dragging breaths they had to take, because their asthma hated cold almost as much as their joints. There was no real way to avoid any of it, aside of finding their new apartment and possibly hiding under their new bed. It was as much a problem of scale as it was anything else—the hospital room had been quiet, in comparison to the buzzing and screeches of the hallways. Isolated. At most two people to track at once, with easily parsed ways to hear them coming and going. Even when getting tests done, remarkably few people seemed interested in being around them for it. If this amount of people had been around them, spread out, it probably wouldn’t have been so… much.

It didn’t help that they had had to navigate while carrying a small library and a jar of candy, wearing shoes that were very much too large. Thomas had gifted them a pair of his old tennis shoes, worn out and ratty. Worn down on one heel. They could walk in them well enough when they’d tried in the hospital, but they hadn’t had to spread their toes to keep from tripping when they walked a circle in their room. They hadn’t had to carry a bunch of things in their room. There certainly hadn’t been any crosswalks _in the hospital._ All this, added on top of their very loose grasp on how much room they actually took up, meant that they ended up running into people several times. Not by much, no full body collisions, but just enough to make them worry about dropping everything or falling. Just enough to send an unpleasant jolt through their joints at the impact. Certainly enough to make them feel bad about the whole thing.

The problem with _that_ was that apologizing for it was almost worse than just grunting and moving on like nothing happened. The problem being, the other person would then actually pause long enough to look at them, if only to muster a politely annoyed look. April had looked in the mirror before leaving the hospital, and determined they only looked mildly like a corpse. Nothing worse than what they’d seen in the library during finals, by their estimation. Apparently they had been overly generous, if the dawning looks of surprise and disgust were anything to go by. People being terrible about how they looked wasn’t _new_ , but there was something a bit painful about ‘April is hideous’ being an international opinion. Some small part of them tried to remember they were still sore, and had the tendency to look a whole lot more serious when that happened, and thus more off putting, but it was drowned out by the general feeling of anxious paranoia. By the final person they’d run into, they more apologized to their feet before hurrying onward and only half looking at the numbers on the buildings they passed.

Reaching their new building had, thankfully, happened before they were entirely overwhelmed to the point of tears. Given that would have been a terribly awkward introduction to the middle aged woman that caught them coming through the front door, they were thankful. They weren’t, however, thankful for the follow up very polite interrogation on just who they were, and why they were there. The implication, of course, was that they didn’t look like they belonged there. They knew that. It wasn’t a _surprise_. No one expects the new resident of a fancy apartment in London to look like a knockoff mobsters kid-sibling that didn’t know how to wash their hair. Certainly not a lady that looked like she went to a hair dresser to maintain a perm, and then could afford a manicure after.

They were oddly comforted by the fact that she’d only paused for a fraction of a second before said interrogation, though. If only because this told them that nosy old women are the same the world over. Polite enough not to say you looked like garbage, but deeply invested on knowing why you did or at the very least finding out something they could assume caused it. Protective of the image their little slice of earth projected, and very concerned about if someone was going to ruin it. Who’s, what’s, when’s. They’d have shut her down a bit faster, but the sheer mundanity of someone thinking they were a threat to something was… oddly reassuring. That said, while it was easier to interact with just one person, their ears were still tingling from the street noise. A very dull comment about just coming out of the hospital shut down the conversation in a way that didn’t sound like they were telling her to fuck off. There were a few moments where April could tell she was weighing the social implications of keeping them there, punctuated by a muttered ‘right, feel better, good to meet you’, before she shuffled up the stairwell. She loitered a bit on the landing to the next floor before climbing out of sight entirely.

While fishing their keys out of a pocket—the candy jar precariously wedged into the doorway with their hip—they determined that was a positive, actually. Nosy neighbors meant someone was always watching for shit to go sideways. Even if said neighbors didn’t notice strangers were Strangers, they’d sure as hell keep a mental note for the rumor mill. Useful. Annoying, and generally meant you had to keep everything clean just in case because they’d invite themselves over to check things out, but useful.

Actually going inside helped calm them down a lot less than anticipated, but it was quieter, and that was enough. Well, in a sense. It was quiet in the same way a house by a highway is quiet, with a comforting low background rumble of cars with just enough variation to keep the mind occupied while it considered other things. Like how the place smelled like an antique shop that was less about selling things, and more about making money off novelty items while people came to look at dusty old relics. It wasn’t quite at the level of the old country store the smell reminded them of, but it certainly reminded them of various great aunts houses that were usually decorated like the place. Or, for example, the fact that the linoleum square that served as the entryway was the sort of yellow that they could just _feel_ was intentional instead of being a product of age. Or how the branching patterns in the cream carpet were a foreign level of crisply defined—obviously never having seen high traffic from work boots or an overzealous shampoo after a spill. The walls, what they could see at any rate, were a pristine shade of eggshell that April was half sure they would taint by breathing on it. It was… clean. Clean and impersonal, just like back home after their mother had went on a cleaning tear.

The place had a sort of uncomfortable air to it as they wedged the candy jar onto a small ornate table by the door, letting the rest of their burdens fall where they may as they shoved the door closed behind them. The books sliding out of their bag and across the floor were ignored primarily because they were spending most of their brain power on working out why it felt strange to be in a place that was, technically, theirs now.

It wasn’t so much that there was something off about the place—on the contrary, it felt oddly homey. The kind of homey houses set up for a showing are, a sort of artfully worn artifice that presupposes the presence of people living in a space without actually making you see another living person. On some level, it was probably the lingering over-stimulation combining with literally everything else about the reality of their situation. On all _other_ levels, they put it down to not knowing much about the place. April found themselves deeply invested in taking a look around—after dead-bolting the door, of course.

From the entryway was a short hallway that rather abruptly opened into the living room, complete with a recliner and a couch that at least looked like someone had sat on them in the last ten years. A glass-top coffee table was artfully distanced between the seating and the television that looked like something their father would have bought entirely to show off with. It was one of the newer, thinner, sets with a box for satellite stations and a combination VCR/DVD player was tucked in beside it. Flanking said television were bookshelves with an unnerving amount of empty space. They’d need more books to fix that. A strange tingle followed the thought, and they weren’t entirely convinced it was unrelated to the static watched sensation that still lingered at the back of their neck. They resolved to ignore _that_ rabbit trail in favor of knowing what their new home looked like. Had to at least reconnoiter a bit before they tired themselves out wondering about spooky tingles.

Next was the kitchen, open to the sitting room, with a surprisingly simple table between the actual cooking area and the carpet. The tile here was actual tile, making a new and interesting sound under their shoes. They could take them off, and probably should, but at that point it felt… secondary to knowing what was around them. They wondered, momentarily, what it would feel like to put bare feet on something again. Right then all they could really get out of their feet was a light throbbing and warmth. The tile was probably a soothing cold, and the carpet was probably soft. They wondered, for a second, if they should buy some slippers and what those would sound like on the floor.

Another itchy rabbit trail to follow once they’d scouted things out.

Remarkably, they were able to locate the trashcan after only opening two cabinets—finding it tucked in a strange slide out compartment by the sink. There wasn’t much terribly of note—it was your standard nice kitchen. The fridge was, unsurprisingly, empty. Behind the table was the sliding door to the small rectangle of grass that passed for a yard. The lock appeared to be sturdy, though they weren’t really capable of hauling on it for a satisfactory assessment. Thankfully, with a little experimenting, they found that a chair could be wedged in at just the right angle to block the slide. Not a great system, but it let them push down the paranoid mental image of someone waltzing in uninvited. And give the neighbors something to chatter about that wasn’t their face.

From there it was a simple matter to follow a hallway left to a bedroom with a connected bathroom. It was a particularly novel experience to locate their new laundry set up inside said bathroom, and they allowed themselves a few moments to play with the washer door while observing the room. Just taking a moment to appreciate the small clicking noise it made. Like the rest of the apartment, the bathroom was clean, with the smell of product being much more present. Nothing looked too complicated to string back together if it broke—though this was mostly a guess from wiggling the cupboard doors after being distracted from the washing machine. The handle on the cabinet closest to the toilet was slightly loose and made a jangling noise that they were _far_ too distracted by. Honestly they probably spent much too long sitting on the floor, wiggling the handle. Once the cramps in their legs reminded them of reality, however, they wandered back into the bedroom and sat on the bed as gingerly as possible. Partially to rest and partially because it didn’t quite feel like it was theirs, still.

The bed was currently made up kind of like what they assumed a hotel looked like: Nothing fancy, but made to look like it was. The pillows were propped up against the headboard, artfully fluffed in the literal exact same position as they were in the photos. The blanket, a surprisingly thick thing, would have best been described as inoffensive. The color scheme in this room was warmer, with red accents. The closet, which stood open, was rather shallow but had more than enough space for their wardrobe of literally nothing.

A surge of willpower allowed them to make an expedition to the guest room down the other hallway and then return once they couldn’t find anything interesting to look at. Most annoying was that the street sounds were more muffled in there, allowing their thoughts to come bubbling back through the hum of traffic.

The first, though not most pressing thing, to demand attention was the lack of spiders. They sidestepped this turning into anxious checking by organizing their miniature library onto shelves, sorted by levels of bullshit. Then by credibility. Then once more by author names, like a normal person. Next was the itchy feeling that they were forgetting something, or had overlooked something massive that would cause problems. This was handled mostly by double checking locks and making sure the phones worked. Finding the fire extinguisher. Looking over the various documents Elias had given them—dropped off by yet another employee—tucked into a sleek black purse that they’d hidden under the books on the way home. Passport, ID card, certificates and forms. A debit card tucked neatly into a checkbook for an account, with the pin number noted in the register. Also noted was a balance and the brisk suggestion that they use said money to have something to eat until their first paycheck. And, they assumed, clothes to wear to this fancy eldritch desk job.

The next issue that cropped up, not so much requesting thought but demanding it with a loudspeaker, was about the documents themselves. Fortunately, their brain held that one back until they’d talked themselves into taking off their shoes and trying to find a comfortable way to sit on their new couch. Unfortunately, it came with the deep conviction that something was wrong about them.

Not that they existed, or the legality of them—though that was probably going to keep them up for at least a few hours—but a particular detail of their existence that April couldn’t really ignore. Well, they could, but that felt a bit like noticing Cthulhu had been going around making people into squid and then deciding that they would try on a suspiciously squishy hat because their neighbor said to. Or, more simply, getting a bunch of dubious items from a very sketchy man and then choosing to forget that both are probably not on the level even a little bit. And, regrettably, they were now entirely focused on the sketchy, squid-like, details.

This detail being, of course, the little postage stamp sized picture of themselves staring up from their new passport. A picture that looked rather like the face they made at every school picture day they’d ever had, while very much being a photo they did not have taken. Same with their ID card, though the image looked slightly less tired and slightly more professional.

Now, obviously they knew they hadn’t been awake the entire time they’d been in England. They weren’t even awake the entire time Elias had been in their hospital room, much less sure of just how much he had actually come into their room. But they were very sure they’d never worn the shirts they had on in either photo, and the them in the images certainly looked awake enough. There was the possibility that they were further out of it than they’d thought, the amnesia being a thing that actually happened and they’d forgotten some major moving around in the meantime. It was a small chance, and fantastically improbable given how bad off they actually were, but it was an option they could choose to believe. Another possibility was that Elias just had access to some deeply talented and scarily efficient forgers. They didn’t know much about photo doctoring, other than it was a thing magazines did—and if legal methods could airbrush a woman to look like a barbie doll, they could probably make a sleeping person look awake. Or make an image whole cloth, from other pictures—they weren’t sure. The only thing they _knew_ was that it took time. Granted, their point of reference was the express option at Walmart’s photo center, but it still took time to just print things. Less time, far less, but still time. Once again, they didn’t _know_.

What they did know, however—thanks to the books Elias had handed them—was that creating a hoax was not that difficult. Making something look just convincing enough to get under scrutiny by wasn’t hard, if you had time and resources. Add in the fact they were currently hip deep in magic bullshit, which could open a door to many new and improbable things, and they rather quickly found themselves curled up under their new comforter trying not to hype themselves out on the flood of ways things could go very, very badly. Simplest among them was that—if they were right and he had some weird arcane photo editor—Elias could frame them for all manner of things if he so chose. If he was angry enough. Honestly, they might not even need to make him angry—just not have the right conversation at the right time. He did, after all, want information on an experience that they honestly struggled to put together in order, let alone in words—even if some events felt like they were still happening. Assuming he wasn’t lying about being a man of his word, they could still toe the line and be fine. Though, if he _was_ lying—which was far more likely—then there might not actually be a line to toe. It could all be an academic stress test to see what would happen if they were given just enough room to hang themselves. Just an extended information trawl that would end out with them tossed over the side like a metaphorical trash fish.

They weren’t sure how long they stayed in bed, wrapped up in their blankets and coming up with worst case scenarios. After a while, the panic that lived in their tightening throat returned to the background—from fatigue if nothing else. They weren’t sure if they had run out of steam, having come up with everything they could think of, or if their body was tired of freaking out. It was, they considered, probably the latter. After all, things could always get worse in unforeseen ways and they _had_ been generally anxious for quite some time. At some point the fight or flight button stops working right because the rubber’s warped a bit, so to speak.

It occurred to them, about the time it had gotten dark and their stomach was growling, that they had two options. Aside, of course, of getting up to rummage around the place for a phone book—food shopping wasn’t going to happen at night, but take out could probably be trusted with enough glaring through the little peephole in the door. The choices were, frustratingly, much more straightforward than working out how to order take out in a new country—partially because the landlord had hidden the phone book inside the hall table by the door and partially because their life was never as excitingly dramatic as fiction. At least, not outside the action sequences.

They could panic, freak out, and spend all their energy between then and going to work so stressed out that they couldn’t do anything. Just go fully unhinged about it, working out every single terrible thing a man with unknown magic or mundane power could do to them. They could lose sleep, making it harder to heal from _everything_ , and generally take themselves even further off their game. Just absolutely wreck themselves over what might happen, or what could happen, or what could be done. Top it all with something wildly irresponsible that they’d be convinced was a good idea at the time that really would wreck any remote possibility of things going well.

Or.

Or they could wait and see, while trying to figure out what in god’s name they’d managed to cannonball into the middle of by being a generally terrible child. Just go on like all the spooky scary skeletons in the world were just a thing they had to handle, now. Because really, if someone like Elias wanted to harm them—he was probably going to. Just like anyone who had ever wanted to hurt them had gone and done it, because they wanted to. Anything that had ever hurt them, so on. They could save their energy and treat this like the ever evolving puzzle box it was. Maybe they could even get scarily proficient at handling spooky magic filing and make an actual career out of their new gilded cage.

Option two certainly sounded less exhausting, and felt a lot like how they’d handled literally everything else so far. Granted, ‘everything else’ generally encompassed survival and realizing they had no idea what a test was talking about, not ghosts. Logically—once their brain let them think logically enough to look at phone numbers—freaking out wouldn’t help anyone.   
It never really did, because the same think jelly telling them this was also the one that hit the alarm whenever they screwed up even a little, but that wasn’t the point. In Elias’s primer, he’d mentioned that the various nasty things they’d tangled with were drawn to—and most importantly, fed upon—fear. What, after all, would be the difference between the fear dredged up in an anxiety attack and the fear of being chased by something? If there was a metaphysical difference, they didn’t know, but they _did_ know that there was very little _emotional_ difference. Sure, it wasn’t reasonable to assume they could just shut that down—if it was possible to find an off switch for being afraid of things, they’d have hit it by now—but they could try to be _practical_ about it. Courage, which seemed to be a major stumbling block to these creepy crawlies, was not the absence of fear or even the refusal to be afraid. Courage was, in the end, looking fear in the eye and continuing in spite of it. And spite was a wonderful motivator.

With an odd sense of determination, they punched in the number for a Chinese place and waited for someone to pick up.

They would have to be brave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also adhd vibes only. i cannot overstate this.  
> Will do my best to get more written down, things are just... [gestures to America, gestures to 2020] So yeah.  
> Thanks for reading!


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